


Dirty Dancing

by windfallswest



Series: Dirty Dancing [7]
Category: The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Case Fic, F/M, Kid Fic, Kidnapping, POV Female Character, POV First Person, Slow Burn, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-12-01
Packaged: 2018-02-13 04:46:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2137494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windfallswest/pseuds/windfallswest
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dirty Dancing's answer to the events of <i>Proven Guilty</i>. Like all great romances, this story is best read after repeated viewings of Hitchcock's <i>The Birds</i>. </p><p>Maggie is two and a half.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here we go, everybody. Non-archive warnings for Harry's decision-making process and canon-typical violence to mythology and pop-culture, as well as the standard kind.

I swore under my breath as traffic ground to a halt on Lake Shore Drive, taking me with it. I was behind the wheel of my car, a patchwork, nominally blue Volkswagen Beetle—vintage, not the nineties redesign—which meant it predated air-conditioning. I had the windows variously cranked down and popped, but for once there was no wind in the Windy City, even this close to Lake Michigan. Having stopped moving it was like sitting in a sauna, right down to the wooden seats since the interior had been collateral damage on a case a couple years ago; and with the Scamp taking over my life I'd never gotten around to having it redone. I'd been lucky to replace the windows, casualty of last Halloween's festivities. The front seats were really just some one-by-sixes duct taped over the metal frames and some foam duct taped over the one-by sixes. The back was taken up by an increasingly sketchy-looking web harness for my kid. It was totally safe though, whatever Michael said.

Maggie wasn't with me now. Thankfully. After what I'd just seen, I wanted my girl back in my arms more than anything, although I'll admit that was mostly for my own comfort. I also wanted to keep her as far away as possible from the scene I'd just come from. Far, far away.

To keep myself far, far away too, while I was wishing for things. The warlock's execution had hit closer to home for me than for any of the rest of the wizards present—and I didn't think they'd decapitated a Korean boy in Chicago because they were going out for pizza afterward.

Anyway, seeing someone's head rolling around of the floor would have set Maggie's potty training back six months. And now I was stuck in traffic, broiling, and getting my arms stuck to scratchy, fraying duct tape. Stars and stones, this was LSD, not the Dan Ryan. Had someone misplaced rush hour?

It wasn't until the radio in the macaroni yellow hummer next to me glitched from something with really heavy bass to a financial report that I remembered the Taste of Chicago was still going on. The Taste is one of Chicago's big cultural tourist attractions. Basically, every restaurant in the city cuts up its best dishes into hors d'oeuvre-sized pieces and descends on Grant Park for ten days in July to sell them to the credulous at exorbitant prices. It should have been a clue when the busses all turned off a half mile back. The Taste plus the Chicago Blues Festival means they reroute up State Street from Museum Campus all the way to the river. Any Chicagoan with half a brain knows to stay off LSD this time of year. _Way to go, Harry_. I was definitely going to miss my appointment now.

I scratched the sweaty hair at the back of my neck, glad I'd finally regained enough dexterity to start braiding it again. The messy wad I'd adopted to keep it out of my face last year had been miserable in the heat. I'd have given in and hacked it all off except that, being a head taller than most men, I get mistaken for one enough already.

It looked like I might as well have gone straight over to the park where Molly had graduated to testing her veils against the werewolves' heightened senses after all. I'd be moving faster if I were running on foot up the Lakefront Trail.

Between food and rent and the Scamp and being drafted by the Wardens last fall, I needed to take work where and when I could get it. I mean, they did at least pay me. But like many long-lived organisations, the White Council tends to lag behind the times; I suppose I was lucky the last time they'd reviewed the Wardens' salary was in 1959 and not 1859.

Cold air hit me like a blast from a freezer, and I looked to my right. The passenger's seat had been replaced by a bucket seat much more comfortable-looking than the original bench had been. In it sat a man who had also not been there a moment ago. He looked like a geek instead of a jock, but there was an understated poise in how he held himself. He was so easily sure in his movements it amounted to a sort of grace; you could see it even in the way he let his head fall back against the headrest, closing his eyes and exhaling in evident enjoyment of the cool breeze as it fluttered his golden-brown hair.

Well, I could see it. If anyone else had been in the Beetle, they'd have seen me scowling into mid-air and kept on sweating buckets. My companion was an illusion cast by the other occupant of my brain: Webweaver, Temptress, former angel and one of the most dangerous demons on the devil's roster—Lasciel. I wondered what it said about me that he—she—whatever—usually chose to appear to me as a man. If anything, I skew in the other direction, although in recent years the question had been pretty academic if you know what I mean.

Before you get the wrong idea, there wasn't really a Fallen Angel in my head. I mean, I'd exposed myself to Lasciel where he was bound in a small, tarnished silver coin a few years back, but I'd handed it over to the Church to lock away in a vault somewhere at almost the first opportunity. But even though the contact had been (essentially) inadvertent, I'd been left with this squatter in my grey matter. He was sort of like the demon demo-version: his purpose was to convince me to buy the deluxe package. Except he didn't expire after thirty days. Immortality, power, the knowledge of ages—all for the low, low price of my soul. Act now, and we'll enslave your will for free.

"I hate you so much right now," I said.

"I fail to understand why you persist in living like this, dear hostess."

Somewhere up ahead a light changed, and traffic started creeping forward again. I put the Beetle back in gear. "I don't know why you're complaining; it's a lot hotter where you're from."

Lasciel twisted his long, pale neck to gaze out over the opaque blue of the lake. It was almost the exact colour of his eyes. "You have no idea where I'm from."

I shivered. Then I scowled. "What are you doing here, anyway? I seem to recall we had an arrangement. What was it? Oh yeah: don't call me, I'll call you."

Lasciel turned back to me, his expression mild in the corner of my eye. "Feel free to do so at any time, dear hostess. I merely sought to remind you that I am at your constant—"

Lasciel cut himself off at the same time my head snapped around. A burst of dark power had split the air, something big. Something with the greasy, sickening feel of black magic. A flock of birds exploded into flight, disturbed by the negative energies.

And it was right in the middle of the Taste of Chicago. Swearing under my breath, I swerved over into the turn only-lane and parked. The cross-streets were blocked off, so the turn lanes were empty.

I snatched my blasting rod out of the box of goodies I kept up front in case of supernatural carjackers—no vanilla mortal would stoop to stealing the Beetle even if it weren't so easy to spot. There were also a few holy water balloons, a large steel wrench, a small jar of slightly smelly grease, some cold lights, a handful of salt packets from Burger King, a white handkerchief carefully folded into a cloth envelope, and a cheap little plant spritzer filled with garlic sauce. Look, with luck like mine, it's good to be prepared. Behind it, there was another box with a constantly mutating collection of children's books, stuffed animals, brightly coloured hair clips, little plastic containers of Cheerios or the granola one of my local practitioner friends foists on me, juice boxes, wet wipes, and the occasional toddler-sized shoe.

On my way out of the car, I also grabbed my staff from where it was jammed down between my improvised seat and the door. I briefly considered the virtues of taking my .44 with me; but it being Chicago in July, my big, billowy, concealing black leather duster was hanging up at home. The gun stayed in the storage compartment under the Blue Beetle's hood, and I dashed across the gridlock towards Buckingham Fountain.

It was only a little bit like Frogger, since no one was moving very fast, but some asshole in an old grey Chrysler almost ran me down. I thought for a second a flash of turquoise stripe was a patrol car, but it turned out to be a Flash Cab. Mostly I just got honked at a lot, which I could live with.

I made it past the security guards, whose job it was to make sure no one smuggled in weaponry or outside foodstuffs, mostly by virtue of momentum. It registered in passing that there were kind of a lot of them. Inside the tall, orange plastic netting it was even harder to move, but I had no trouble homing in on the source of the spell. Whatever had been done had been either big or lacking in finesse, and at least a little of both. Oh, goody.

There was no disturbance at the spot in the street where I found the black magic residue until I got there and a man in a polo shirt and khaki shorts bumped into me. He had maybe a few years on me, enough to be visibly losing the war against the onset of middle-age. From my superior vantage, I was getting a good look at his retreating hairline.

The guy seized my arms, a panicked expression on his face. "Hey, have you seen a kid around? A little boy, nine years old."

I broke his grip and took as much of a step back as I could in the press, centring my balance. There was none of the electric tingle you get when you touch another practitioner, though, so I held off on doing anything more extreme for the moment.

"What?"

"A boy! He was just here."

My stomach started sinking as my brain started making connexions. "What was he wearing?"

"Red—a red shirt," the guy gestured. "He was eating that shark stuff, he was bitching all the way here about how he wanted to eat a shark."

"Where'd you see him last?"

"He ran off this way. I was just a second behind him. I took my eye off him for one goddamned second; there was supposed to be—hey! You find him yet? You were supposed to be keeping an eye on him; that's what I pay you for, isn't it?"

I glanced over and started revising my assessment of the likelihood I was about to get pounded. A guy with the approximate size, build, and—at a guess—intelligence of a mountain rolled up on my left. He wasn't visibly armed, but he might as well have had _bodyguard_ stamped on his forehead. Good thing for me I was carrying a couple of wooden sticks.

"Who's this?"

The first guy turned back to me. "I don't know. Who the hell are you, anyway?"

"Harry. What a coincidence meeting you here. Nothing's on fire, is it?"

I stiffened. Blood rushed to my face; I swallowed drily. "Marcone. This day just keeps getting better," I managed with a good approximation of my usual bile.

"Do you know this woman?"

"Miss Dresden is a private investigator of my acquaintance. Have you located Trevor yet?"

"No." The first guy—who I was getting a strong suspicion was some sort of business associate of Marcone's, i.e. a mobster—ran his hand through his hair and went back to sweeping the crowd.

"I put the word out with event security. Mister Hendricks, please accompany Mister Abbascia. Mark, when we get any news, you'll be the first to know."

"John."

I watched as Marcone and Abbascia shook hands. Marcone was doing the thing where he looked like a wholesome, confidence-inspiring college football coach. And not, you know, the crime lord of Chicago. He did it well; he got a lot of practice. It even fooled some people, the tan and the smile and the yuppie/businessman wardrobe. Just don't make the mistake of looking into his eyes.

Marcone's bodyguard Hendricks was even more wall-like than his counterpart. I have a few inches on Marcone, but what really gripes Hendricks' ass is that I'm just a little bit taller than him, too. He cast his employer a mistrustful glance as he led the way through the crowd. Hendricks and I don't really get along.

Reluctantly, I turned back to Marcone. I hadn't seen him since we got trapped in that elevator together the other day. I wasn't precisely avoiding him—I mean, you could technically say I'd been avoiding Marcone for years. Most people avoid the mob if they can. And he wasn't precisely avoiding me. He'd made a habit of popping up to remind me of his existence once every month or two for the past few years, and the elevator thing had only been last week. It was just that after—anyway, I wasn't thinking about that. I wasn't going to bring it up. If Marcone brought it up, I'd shut him down, and that was that.

"I'd say this was a pleasant surprise, but experience has taught me to be cautious," Marcone said, breaking the uncomfortable silence that had fallen between us.

Business. I could do business. "What happened?"

"I was taking in the Taste with an associate of mine from out of town and his son. We were conversing over there, by that stand on the corner. The boy disappeared between five and ten minutes ago. He's a spoiled little monster, but his father still values his safety." There was a hard edge to Marcone's agate eyes.

Translation: Marcone was schmoozing some other dirtbag from out of town, they left the bodyguards to babysit, and the kid got bored and wandered off.

"Anything else?" I asked. I was scanning the crowd, but there was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

"I sent a man to hunt up behind the stands for him; a flight of pigeons had been disturbed. That was when we noticed he was missing. I'd be inclined to think he had merely wandered off, if it weren't for the other disappearances. And..." Marcone trailed off.

I finally gave in and met his eyes. "And what?" I prodded contrarily.

"And you. You arrived here mere minutes after the boy vanished; I've learned not to discount that sort of coincidence." Marcone's gaze shifted to fix on something over my shoulder. "Are you involved in a case at the moment?"

I cranked my head over my shoulder to take a look; a knot of cops was fighting its way towards us through the crowd, coming from the direction of the entrance I'd just barrelled through. "Maybe. Hell's bells, it's not like I'm blocking traffic or anything."

"Could you find Trevor Abbascia?" Marcone asked me seriously. "You would be paid, of course."

"Fuck the money," I replied automatically. I tapped my blasting rod against my thigh. "Ordinarily, I'd kick this over to a PI I know who specialises in missing kids, but we're standing smack in the middle of some serious psychic residue." I'd been trying to get a read on it, actually, but I'm not as sensitive to this type of thing as the apprentice is. Beyond a niggling feeling of almost-familiarity, all I could tell was that the caster wasn't anyone—or anything—I'd encountered previously. There wasn't the rending feeling of a silent death-scream, at least.

"Can you tell what happened?"

"Stop right there! Police!"

I had been stopped for a couple minutes now, but I shifted my blasting rod into the same hand as my staff and raked loose wisps of hair out of my face, waiting for them to catch up. "You guys made good time," I told them. "We've got another missing kid."

The man in front blinked at me for a moment, then continued with his script. "Miss, do you drive a...blue," he finally decided, "Volkswagen Beetle, licence number—"

"Yeah, it's my car." I dug out my slightly disintegrating wallet and flipped it open one-handed so I could thumb out the laminated card that said I was a consultant for the department.

There were three cops; two of them looked a little like Simon and Garfunkel. The third was a black woman between them in height. She reached around Simon to pluck the card out of my fingers. "It's SI's pet witch," she said in a tone of disgust.

"Wizard," I corrected.

"I don't care who you're working with; you can't just park in the middle of the road and come running in past security carrying a...big stick." Her other hand was resting pointedly on her own stick now. "And there's also the matter of some bloody clothes we found in your trunk."

"It's from last Halloween," I lied. "And anyway, what were you doing in my trunk without a warrant?" Beside me, I could feel Marcone's interest stir. I made a face and a little down-boy gesture. Worry about Marcone getting involved in White Council politics later; deal with the pissed-off cops now.

"Looking for your engine. "

"Engine's in the back," I pointed out, re-directing the conversation. Except _of course_ I'd just drawn attention to Marcone, who'd been hanging back and letting me flounder. Jerk.

"Ah." The guy who looked like Simon elbowed the patrolwoman in the ribs before she could say anything else. All eyes were suddenly on Marcone.

"Excuse me," he said, taking control of the conversation without moving a muscle except the ones in his clean-shaven, criminal jaw. "If you'll take a moment to check with dispatch, I think you'll find another abduction has been reported. I'm sure your superiors will feel it more important to pursue that rather than traffic violations."

The officers glanced at each other uncertainly. I didn't think any of them was over thirty, and I was pretty sure the stringy one who looked like Garfunkel had been on security at the entrance I'd blown past on my way in. I knew a lot of the more experienced street cops in the city, on both forces, but I didn't know these three. Simon exchanged a look with the patrolwoman, who was probably his partner, before taking a few steps away and doing what Marcone told him.

I looked back and forth between Marcone and the officers. "Are you kidding me? Just like that?"

"Harry, is this really the time—" Marcone started.

"Yes!" I objected. "Yes, it is always the time. That's why they call it law and order, not whim and chaos. Stars and stones, I deserve to get towed! I was asking for it!"

"And does young Trevor deserve whatever may be happening to him at the hands of persons or forces unknown while you distract the police?" Marcone said softly, suddenly intense as a knife at your throat.

"Don't pull strings for me, Marcone."

"I'm merely making a plea for reasoned action," Marcone replied a little more loudly. "Would it make you feel better if I promised not to interfere should the good officers decide to arrest you?"

I glared. Marcone was blandly unmoved. I swung around to face the patrolwoman instead. "Can I have my card back, please?" I asked almost politely.

The patrolwoman handed it over. I noticed her noticing my one-handed trick with the wallet and either the glove I wore on my left hand or the fact I didn't let go of either staff or blasting rod. Maybe both. The glove didn't cover the less severe burns that went up my wrist onto my forearm, just like the tank top I was wearing didn't hide all the scarring from a couple gunshot wounds to my shoulders.

She wasn't so much afraid or obedient as resigned in the face of Marcone's interference. The heavy dose of South Side in her speech told me she'd grown up knowing how gangs worked. If Marcone had been pouring someone cement shoes, she might have gotten involved; but she knew her bosses weren't going to follow through here.

"Cass," the guy who looked like Simon said.

The patrolwoman walked over to where he stood and talked with him for a minute, not once taking her eyes off us. Garfunkel was looking more and more nervous.

"All right," Cass said at last. "Johnson, go back to the gate. Luke and I are going to help with the search. Sir," she turned to Marcone, "will you be available to give a statement? Every detail is important in these cases."

"Of course. Please inform your lieutenant I will speak with the agent in charge of the investigation," Marcone told her seriously.

"Sorry for the inconvenience. I'm sure we'll find him soon," Simon/Luke added.

The cops evaporated. I shook my head. "I can't believe I just watched that happen."

"Could we perhaps focus?" Marcone asked.

I set my jaw and started to pin Marcone with my eyes, except I had to look away almost immediately. Missing kid, I reminded myself. I shoved aside my irritation and embarrassment and crouched down to touch the asphalt with my left hand, trying to get a better read on the psychic impression. I'm good at finding things, following things; but there was nothing here to get a hold of. I'd probably recognise it if I saw it again, but we didn't have time to wait for me to trip over a lead in my usual fashion.

"Back up," I told Marcone.

We had gathered a ring of onlookers by this time. Well, we were blocking traffic and jawing with the police; plus, as soon as people had food the next thing they went in search of was something to look at. I put them from my mind as I straightened up, fixing my eyes on the pavement. Then I called up my Sight.

What most people don't realise is that magic is everywhere; it's more pervasive than air, sunlight, or darkness. Vanilla mortals get the idea that because they can't see it, magic is an aberration, something unnatural that wizards create and then use to do unnatural things. In reality, magic is as integral a part of the world as gravity.

But along with the ability to manipulate the energy all that life generates comes the capability to perceive it. Or maybe it's the other way around; no one really understands how or why the Sight works the way it does. Like I said, magic comes from life, all forms of life, including and especially the emotions and will of people. By invoking the Sight, a wizard can look upon a person's true nature and the traces they leave behind. It can get pretty random and impressionistic, depending on what you're looking at, and not always in a good way.

The Sight strips away all veils, every pretence. I've seen visions so pure and good the memory moves me to tears. I've looked on things that still wake me up screaming at night sometimes. I've witnessed power so awesome and vast it nearly drove me insane. Because that's the price: once you See something, it's there in your memory forever, as crisp and clear as if it were still in front of you.

I looked down at the spot where I was pretty sure Trevor Abbascia had disappeared and nearly fell on my ass.

My eyes panned up briefly, but I jerked them back down before I could register more than a blur of colour like a wild tangle of neon lights. I realised the startlement I'd felt wasn't entirely my own; it was in the air around me, like a sens-surround snapshot of the exact instant someone popped a balloon.

There was none of the pain and fear I'd been expecting; just the blurred impression of a bird in flight, about six inches from the ground. Traces of black magic hung in the air like smoke, as acrid, formless, and difficult to see through.

"Well?" Marcone asked.

Without thinking, I glanced back up at him. Marcone looked like Marcone to my inner sight: big surprise. The main difference was that he was wearing almost as much black as my own subconscious did, in place of his habitual suit. Except when I looked at his hands I could feel them on my skin. When my eyes completely without my permission skipped to his lips, I could hear rumbling laughter. And his face—when I met his eyes I saw again that expression that had been there in the elevator.

I pushed my Sight away, hard.

"Miss Dresden?" Marcone was saying carefully, like maybe he was repeating himself. His consideration made me even more irritable.

I gave him a sour look. "Nothing useful. Come on, let's get out of here."

Agreeably, Marcone fell into step beside me. I bit back a waspish comment, finally deciding on, "Can you get me something of his?"

Marcone thought a moment. "Yes. Does this mean you don't believe the magic you sensed has anything to do with the boy's disappearance?"

"Hell, for all I know he went for ice cream." I hoped he'd gone for ice cream. The alternative—that someone had abducted this child either by ordinary means or using magic—sent my blood roaring past my ears. I had to clench my hands to keep them from shaking. I couldn't help but think how I'd react if someone took Maggie. She'd been in danger a time or two, and I hadn't reacted with what you might call the most rational self-control. "It might have been a veil; a spell doesn't have to be black magic in order to feel like it if the energy being used to fuel it is tainted. Whoever it was could have popped out, grabbed the kid, scared the birds, and taken off."

Except that didn't explain why I'd sensed it all the way over on LSD. Whatever had happened had been noisy; veils are, by definition, quiet. "Or it might have been coincidence."

"Would it help you to examine the locations where the other children went missing?" Marcone asked.

Because neither of us really believed in coincidence anymore, and if one disappearance was supernatural it was a good bet the rest of them were, too. Right. I looked around at the mob we were shouldering our way through. "Probably not. A spell would have to be downright explosive for anything useful to survive days of this. Literally millions of people have been through here since yesterday; that much traffic puts out a lot of psychic noise even without the added emotional brouhaha you get at an event like this."

"But you could still trace Trevor?"

"Remember learning about synecdoche in high school English? Thaumaturgy works kind of like that," I explained. "A part and the whole. I wouldn't really be following where he's been. The link is formed between the focus and the object of the search." There were a few different ways of doing it, actually, but the one I thought was most likely to work would take me in a straight line from wherever I was to where the boy was being held.

Maintaining an uncomfortable silence was hard in a crowd like that, but we managed it. Usually, Marcone and I spark off one another like potassium in water—or was that caesium?—even in the middle of the most inappropriate and time-sensitive life-or-death situations. I can produce witnesses. What can I say? It's an involuntary reaction; I don't think Marcone can help himself either. Silence, period, was normally a tall order.

But there was a thing, and we were both exercising hugely atypical restraint in not poking at it, Marcone never being one not to exploit a weakness, and myself never being one to know when to stop poking at something. In any case, we were both being careful not to bring up the subject of, you know, how my tongue had ended up in Marcone's mouth last week, and vice-versa. I know I was just glad—surprised but glad—that Marcone hadn't immediately gone after me with all guns blazing; and I was reluctant to jog his memory in case maybe all he needed was the reminder. Or the perceived encouragement, or whatever. I didn't know why Marcone was avoiding the subject. Maybe he wanted to get business out of the way first. Part of me wanted to believe he'd decided it was a mistake too and we could just both keep pretending none of it it had ever happened, forever.

What was that? You want to know what I'd been thinking, kissing Marcone in the first place? Yeah, well me too. No, but really, I figure it all comes down to basic human weakness.

That there was chemistry between myself and the head of organised crime in Chicago was nothing new, and neither was the fact that Marcone would have liked to do something about it. He didn't come right out and say it, but ever since Lea I know that look. Marcone had had it on his face the first time we met. Reason number 2,568,439 to stay away from Marcone. Right?

Human beings need touch. We evolved as social creatures—everyone's seen pictures of chimps grooming each other. Our bodies are wired not only to reward touch, but to require it. They've done studies about how depriving monkeys of touch as infants screws them up later in life. Try it. Go hug someone—preferably someone you already know—or cuddling, even holding hands. It lowers your blood pressure, releases happy chemicals in your brain, and makes you generally less cranky. Some doctors even prescribe pets for their heart patients.

The skin is our biggest sensory organ, and the most ignored in Western society. We've built up all these taboos against casual touch outside some really pretty narrow social parameters. Ask Georgia Borden—she's the one studying psychology. Maybe that's what was wrong with the dried up old prunes on the White Council. Next time I saw Morgan, I ought to walk up and give him a big old hug, see if it improved his attitude.

These days, I wasn't nearly as isolated as I used to be. With the Scamp, I was getting more physical contact and affection than I'd had since Elaine. Don't get me wrong: I loved Hawk, but we never lived together, and we didn't see each other all that often; it's one of many regrets I have. I barely set Maggie down that first year; how she found time to learn to walk like three months before the books said I'll never know. And since there was no room in my apartment for a second bed—Thomas slept on my couch when he stayed over, which was happening less and less lately—the Scamp had been sleeping with me since she outgrew her cradle. And Molly's siblings were like a hug grenade whenever I saw them. It was a long way from four years ago, when most of the physical contact I got came from my cat.

Despite more or less living together, Thomas and I were very careful not to touch, though. My half-brother is a White Court vampire, and some lingering effects in my aura from events surrounding Maggie's conception meant I was poison to him. And he was my _brother_. There were some things he just couldn't help me with (although let's just say the Raiths are even more screwed up than the Dresdens and leave it at that; this is one contest I'm completely okay with not winning).

The reason I still couldn't so much as shake Thomas' hand even though Maggie was rising three years old was that I hadn't been, y'know, close to anyone in all that time. I've never been exactly promiscuous, but that was kind of a long dry spell, even for me. Usually, I was too busy with work and the Scamp and, since last fall, helping fight the war to think about it. And I am a wizard: I've trained my powers of focus and concentration from a young age. Magic is all about willpower. Celibacy is like pumping iron.

But then last week I'd gone and gotten myself stuck in an elevator with Gentleman Johnny Marcone and no conveniently distracting mayhem. Some things had kind of come out into the open, and I kissed him. Politely, Marcone had kissed me back. Well, not so much politely as—

Anyway. That's what happened. It had been a really long time, and there's always all this tension in the air with Marcone, and I'd had a moment of weakness. If he wasn't going to bring it up, I sure as hell wasn't either.

I was about to ask Marcone who this ABBA guy was anyway when his cellphone rang. He made a few uninformative I'll-be-right-there noises and picked up the pace.

We got to Hendricks and Abbascia a few seconds before the FBI did. I guessed it was bad form to leave your mafia guests alone with law enforcement. I watched the suits approach and tried not to look like part of the Family. There were only two of them, both men, bracketing the spectrum of middle-age. The older one looked like he'd come straight from the same classic movie casting pool as Marcone—you know, the type of hardass officer or general who always had a cigar clenched between his teeth and a minor shouting problem. His strong, outthrust jaw gave the impression of being clamped shut, mouth a humourless gash above it. His eyes were narrow or possibly just deep-set, but in either case lost in the beginning webwork of deep lines that seamed his face and shelved back under a heavy brow. To complete the image, he had a brush of iron-grey hair cut military-short. He might as well have had a sign reading 'Special Agent I'm in Charge Here' above his head.

By contrast, his companion was almost unremarkable. He was a bit taller than the senior agent, with the build and posture of a man who knew how to handle himself in a fight. His features were regular, if not particularly exciting: brown hair with a bit more on the way of length and styling than Mister Special Agent I'm in Charge Here. The most interesting thing about him was his Magic Eight Ball tie. And he had watchful eyes.

Mister Special Agent I'm in Charge Here sauntered up with his hands in the pockets of his brown windowpane check suit and the first button on his charcoal grey shirt undone, tie nowhere in evidence. He scanned our little group and stopped facing Abbascia. The other agent followed half a step behind.

"Mister Abbascia, Mister Marcone. I'm Special Agent Keithly, FBI; my team's been assigned to the recent kidnappings."

Keithly pulled out his badge. Abbascia cast a quick, sidelong look at Marcone, who nodded minutely.

Abbascia examined Keithly's credentials and handed them back. "Agent Keithly, do you think my son was taken by the same people who took the other boys?"

"At this point, it's hard to say, Mister Abbascia. I'm aware there are also some other factors to consider; I'd appreciate it if you gentlemen shared any information you might have that's relevant to the case." Keithly was hard to get a read on. I couldn't tell whether he was just good at putting aside his personal feelings or he really didn't care who he was dealing with.

"I assure you, we have the same goal: finding the persons responsible for these crimes so they can be brought to justice," Marcone said. He'd managed to bury most of his terrifying intensity again beneath his usual charm, but the hair still stood up on my arms.

"I appreciate that," Keithly said. I decided provisionally that I liked this guy.

"Sir," the junior agent interrupted, pointing at the cellphone he'd answered during the exchange of polite fictions. "Tracey and Schnur."

"Give it here, Rick. Excuse me." Keithly plucked the phone from the younger agent's ear and backed up a pace, turning side-on to the proceedings.

This brought him over near me, unfortunately for his reception. I was about to sidle away out of mercy to the poor phone when Keithly cast a sceptical look up at me and said, "Find out who she is. Give it to me, Peyton; I'm listening."

"She's Harry Dresden," I told Rick over both Keithly's head and a wash of static on the cellphone.

Bizarrely, Rick looked enlightened. "The witch? Karrin's told me about you."

"Wizard." There's a difference, dammit.

"Really?"

"Note the staff," I grated. Then I rewound the conversation in my mind and played it back. So this was _that_ Rick. "You have a reception after the wedding, or did you go straight into the funerals?"

Rick smiled charmingly. "My brothers-in-law patted the girls down before the ceremony."

I snorted.

"SI isn't working this one," Rick went on. "Major Case is doing the footwork."

"So I've heard. It's all over the news."

Rick glanced between Marcone and me. Marcone was pleasantly unreadable, which was just such a lie it made me want to elbow him in the ribs, or maybe step on one of those handmade Italian leather shoes.

"You're being employed by Mister Marcone or Mister Abbascia, then?" Rick asked.

It wasn't just the judgement on my character—and I couldn't believe Murphy would ever have said anything that could possibly have led anyone to believe I'd roll over for Marcone—that got to me. After all, it was his job to be suspicious. No, it was the way he was already dropping me from his attention so he could focus on the menfolk in charge. Maybe I was being unfair: maybe he just wasn't interested in hearing a bunch of new-age nonsense from a cruddy little PI with a gimmick; maybe I'd heard Murphy gripe about him once too often and some of her anger at her ex-husband marrying her baby sister (yeah, you read that right) had bled over and was affecting my judgement. Hard to tell where objective disapproval left off and solidarity took over.

But between them Rick and Keithly had combined to rub me the wrong way enough that when I answered, I was a little more snappy than I needed to be.

"No."

"No?"

"No, I am not working for the crime kingpin of Chicago, or whoever the hell this ABBA guy is."

Agent Rick choked a little on my bluntness, and Keithly continued to regard me sideways in between growling at the perfidy of new-fangled technology. Abbascia was starting to look less than happy about our collective ability to scrape our shit together.

"Are you working for _anyone_ , Miss Dresden, or are you just interfering with our investigation for the hell of it?"

"I've been hired to find Ayden Washington," I said, smiling passive-aggressively. "Since you seem to be having some trouble doing it."

Okay, hired might be exaggerating it a bit. But the appointment I'd just missed had been with an Izabylle Washington. How many Washingtons could there be in Chicago? Well, my landlord, for one. Anyway, Ayden had been the fourth kid to go missing, two days ago, and the only local. The kidnappings had been in the news all week, but until today I'd assumed they were on my old mentor Nick Christian's side of the fence, not mine. I'd figured on probably referring Izabylle to him during our appointment. Now I was thinking maybe Izabylle knew something I didn't.

Rick glanced at Keithly, who was doing a decent job of pretending he wasn't watching this all go down. "Please try to remember this is a serious investigation."

"Gee, and I was just about to pull out my crystal ball."

Keithly growled something into the cellphone—he'd started circling in the narrow space our grim little knot of mostly suited men had accumulated, looking for better reception—and tossed it back to Rick.

"What was that call? Have you found Trevor?" Abbascia asked. He was doing an all right job of holding it together—my estimates of where he stood in the business kept going up—but he was still obviously in distress.

"I'm afraid it was just some test results coming back from the lab," Keithly told him. "Mister Abbascia, I wonder if you won't mind moving someplace a bit quieter. I've got some questions, and I promise I'll be notified immediately in case your boy turns up."

"Of course, Agent Keithly." Abbascia pulled out what looked to me like a professional smile. I noticed he didn't look to Marcone this time.

No one stopped me from following along, so I decided to chalk it up as a win. There were two cops watching the exit we went out, and two doing intake; I recognised a couple of them plus Garfunkel-Johnson, but there was no time to stop and chat right now.

We came out on the south side of the park, and as everybody but the bodyguards tried to eavesdrop on what Marcone and Abbascia were saying to one another I glanced up the road. The Beetle was being towed after all; I tried to decide whether I ought to feel annoyed or vindicated. I settled for being impressed they'd gotten a wrecker through traffic this quickly. My moral victory was somewhat undercut by the fact I was going to have to spring for the cash to rescue my main means of transportation from the impound lot. Well, it wasn't like they didn't know me there.

Keithly led us around to a knot of police cars partially blocking foot traffic along one of the already blocked-off cross-streets. Hendricks' unhappy expression—contrasted with Marcone's understated gravity—was exactly mirrored by his counterpart. I guess the bosses were delegating their nerves.

A little to my surprise, Keithly ran Marcone's group through the full interview right then and there. I suppose it made sense; that bunch was going to be hard to get into an FBI office and even harder to get to talk there. Not only was everything still fresh in their minds, but they might also be shaken up enough yet to be cooperative. Any later interrogation would have to take place after they'd had a chance to get their stories straight or do too much thinking.

The account Abbascia gave Keithly fit with the ones I'd gotten earlier from him and Marcone, only in slightly more circumspect language. I hung back and watched Marcone doing what I was doing, which was watching everybody else. He was being concerned and sincere and not at all murderous now. Now we were in more or less private, it was at least revealing to see he wasn't just ordering the FBI around. I mean, I was sure the FBI was investigating Marcone—it wasn't that no one ever tried to pin anything on him; it just never stuck. But Marcone's supposed to have a lot of pull in more than just Chicago. I'd be more surprised if he didn't have a few FBI agents in his pocket.

"And how did you come to be on the scene before the police, Miss, ah, Dresden, was it?" Keithly asked.

Oh, crap. So much for being overlooked—hey, it happens sometimes. I pulled out a smile, because if they were going to insist on not believing me anyway, I was might as well be irritating.

"I was stuck in traffic on Lake Shore Drive when I noticed someone doing something major with black magic in the middle of Grant Park, so I pulled over and went to check it out. I followed the traces to a spot on Columbia over by the Polo Café stand. I ran into Abbascia—or vice-versa, actually—and then the rest of the gang. Marcone had already called it in at that point," I continued matter-of-factly, ignoring the way Marcone was pinching the bridge of his nose, obviously reading between the lines. "It looked like another kidnapping, so I decided to stick around."

"Black magic," Keithly repeated drily. "And what did that tell you?"

"That something startled some birds."

Rick snorted. I ignored him and kept on not quite meeting Keithly's eyes. There's a trick to looking at someone without actually looking them in the eye that you pick up when you're a wizard. The reason I could meet Marcone's was that we'd already shared a soulgaze and it's a one-time deal. But, like the Sight, it stays with you forever; more than that, it goes both ways: the other person, wizard or not, sees into you, too. Six years ago, I'd seen the hard, bare place that was Marcone's soul, and I remembered it every time I looked at him.

"You're sure you weren't already inside the festival when Trevor disappeared?" Keithly asked.

"Yeah," I said. "You can check with Officer Johnson; I passed him going in. Plus the two who had my car towed." I jerked my thumb in the direction of Lake Shore Drive, where the wrecker had managed to ooze its way out through traffic, taking the Beetle with it.

"We'll check it out."

I rolled my eyes. "Before you get too in love with that theory, this is the first time I've been to the Taste this year. And if I weren't noticeable enough on my own, I know a lot of the cops in this town." Also, where was I hiding the kid? Down my pants?

"Well enough they'd cover for you?" Rick chimed in.

I glared at him. "I said they knew me; I never said they liked me."

"I guess we'll have to check that out, too."

Great.

"Agent Keithly," Abbascia broke in, "do you have any leads on the kidnappings?"

"So far, your son's disappearance fits with the pattern of the other missing children," Rick said. "The kidnapper hasn't made contact or demanded a ransom so far, but none of the other boys had prominent parents. If you are contacted, let us know immediately. There are five other families out there in the same situation you're in; some of them are getting pretty desperate."

Rick glanced pointedly at me. I gave him a mental rude gesture; I hate breaking in new cops. If Murphy could just run every criminal investigation I'm involved with, it would make my life so much easier. Probably do a lot for the department's solve-rate, too.

"Have you handled many kidnappings?"

"More than I'd like," Keithly replied. "My people know what they're doing, and we can draw on the police at need for backup."

"I'm sure the department will be more than happy to cooperate," I told Keithly, looking Marcone right in the eye.

Rick cleared his throat, obviously uncomfortable with this turn in the conversation. He stepped in firmly to change the subject. I thought it was pretty entertaining, listening to him trying to chivvy two mob bosses into the local FBI office, or at least letting them bug Marcone's phone. My suggestion that I'd be more than willing to come in and look over their files went down like a lead balloon.

Well, I had other things to do anyway. Marcone caught my eye as our little conclave broke up, and there was a strained moment when we both decided to forgo the traditional let-me-drop-you-somewhere-go-jump-in-the-lake parting dance. Instead, I walked around to the nearest payphone, which was located outside the Art Institute, and made some calls.


	2. Chapter 2

The first one was to Billy Borden. He and the rest of the Alphas were down at Wolf Lake Park, chasing my apprentice around. Werewolves: they're such suckers for cliché. The voice on the other end of the line when Billy's phone stopped ringing belonged to Georgia, though, his new bride. 

"Will Borden's phone; to whom am I speaking?"

"It's just me, Georgia," I told her. 

"Oh, hi, Harry. Did you make your appointment?"

"No, and my car got towed. How's the Scamp behaving for you?"

"She's been running around almost as much as Molly, but there are thirteen of us and we can cheat. How do you keep track of her on your own?" 

That was Maggie all over. "I can cheat, too. Listen, something's come up. Can you get Molly for me?"

"It might take a minute." A pause. "What happened?"

I made a face Georgia couldn't see over the phone. "It looks like I've got a case after all."

"Here, give me a sec," Georgia said. "Hey Maggie, want to talk to your mom for a bit?"

"Mommy?" a high, childish voice came on the line.

"Heya, Scamp. You having fun with Uncle Billy and Aunt Georgia?" I paused my rummaging for spare change. There are some times, I have to admit, that a cellphone would be useful. But that static Keithly had been getting wasn't an aberration: one of the reasons I drive a car that saw its first owner before Watergate is that anything newer just can't hack it. Technology and magic don't mix well, period.

"Mowwy an' Affas pway hide'n'seek."

I felt a goofy grin spread over my face. "Did they let you play?"

"I not pway; I dwink _joos_ ," Maggie replied with all the scathing logic of a two-year-old. "We pway tag," she allowed magnanimously.

"Who played tag with you?"

"Mouse an' Cinny an' Marcy, an' then Gee an' Andi. They all nakes. I not nakes 'cause I not a woof."

I choked. Maggie was a precocious little scamp all right. I could be glad at least the boys were making the change out of sight. I could just picture it: a small, dark-haired figure running naked through the grass, surrounded by a pack of giant wolves. That would have been such great blackmail material later in life.

"That's great," I told her. "I'm sorry I missed it. I had to go to work."

"Mommy work lots," agreed Maggie sagely.

"Yeah, and she's going to have to work tonight, too. So Molly's going to take you home, and then Thomas is going to stay with you. Okay?"

"'Kay." 

One thing you could say about the Scamp was that she was adaptable. I'd say it was my erratic lifestyle, but the truth was I'd just lucked out. The downside was that she was easily bored and not afraid to let me know it. 

"You've got your faerie wand and your special hankie, right?" I asked. "And your chalk?"

"Uh-huh."

"Good." I bit my lip on telling her to _be safe_ because this was Maggie, after all, and she was too young for it to mean anything to her but smart enough to maybe be scared. "Mommy loves you," I said instead. "Can you give the phone back to Georgia now?"

"Gee!" I heard, a bit muffled, and then Georgia was back.

"Hey. Molly should be here soon. Is there anything we can do to to help?"

The Alphas weren't just werewolves: they looked after Hyde Park the way I looked after Chicago, sort of like the CPD and UCPD, only we were friends. And the UCPD doesn't have an equivalent of the CPD's SI, with whom I regularly consult. I'd seen the Alphas grow from a bunch of pimply, over-eager kids into a tough, competent unit. Not to mention good friends.

"Nah, just tell everybody they can go home," I said with exaggerated casualness I knew Georgia would pick up on. "Uh. I could use a ride, though."

"I think we can swing it. Here she— Holy shi—I mean, what happened to you?" 

The last half of this was faint, as though Georgia were holding the phone away from her face, but I could still hear the snicker in her voice.

"Wipe your hands first," I heard, then Molly's voice speaking directly into the receiver. "Hey." She sounded more than a touch peeved.

"I thought the two-year-old was the one I had to tell not to play in the mud, Padawan." Keenly honed powers of deduction, that's me.

"Have _you_ ever had to hide from a pack of werewolves in the woods?" Molly asked acidly.

"Yup," I said. "I stayed pretty clean up until they dumped me in the pit, though."

"...Sorry, I forgot who I was talking to for a minute. You know, for friends of yours these guys spend a lot of time without their clothes on."

I frowned. "What's that supposed to mean? No, never mind. This case is heating up; I want you to take Maggie home. Call Thomas; he'll look after her for the night."

"What case?" Molly asked.

I grimaced. "Looks like there's something fishy about those kidnappings. When you get home, tell your dad I said to keep everyone behind the threshold. Especially Matt and Harry."

"Dad's not home," Molly said after a beat too long. "He got called away this morning."

Molly's father Michael was one of the Knights of the Cross. He took his orders, so far as I could tell, from arch-angels; and when he got called away, it usually meant something evil was about to get smote. Occasionally, that something was something I was also trying to smite. Looked like this wasn't going to be one of those times.

"Okay, Mols. I've got your back, and some pretty hefty Heavenly forces have got your dad's. The wards still good?"

Since Molly had become my apprentice a couple years back—and especially since some zombies had banged through my own wards last fall—she'd been helping me put up wards around her parents' house in secret. It was part prudence, part thank-you, part good practice for Molly, and part chance for me to experiment with new ideas before I stripped down my own wards, because I didn't dare leave my apartment vulnerable even for one night. My landlord was an ex-cop and it had been Halloween, so he'd bought that I'd pissed off a street gang. Barely. Since the whole city was going crazy. Not that that gave me a whole _lot_ of points in his book.

Secret because her parents were—big surprise—pretty devout, and they didn't really approve of magic. I'd managed to convince them Molly's wasn't going to go away no matter how hard they ignored it, but let's just say it was still a tense subject. They hadn't really appreciated my role in introducing Molly to her girlfriend, who was sweet and not in any danger at all of turning into a vampire anymore, either.

"Yeah."

"And I've got a feeling I'm going to be drawing the heavy fire on this one anyway."

"Gee, that makes me feel so much better." I could almost hear the eye-roll.

"Oh, and stay—"

"—inside after dark, I know."

They grow up so fast. I sighed. "No kidding, grasshopper."

"I can do more than just babysit," Molly bulled on. "I mean, I could help you with your case."

"Maybe, but I'm asking you to do this."

A note of surly defiance crept into Molly's tone. "I'm legally an adult now. You were out on your own at my age."

Speaking of growing up too fast. 

"I was nineteen, actually. And I'd been studying magic since I was ten." How could I get it through to my apprentice that the things that had made me tough so young were bad accidents, not good intentions? "It's not a question of being ready. I'm asking Thomas to stay at home, too." 

There, that was a good point. But. "This is the way it is, Molly. I'm not your parents. You agreed back when we started this to follow my instructions. That doesn't just mean magic."

"Yes'm," Molly mumbled contritely. "Um, Georgia wants to know where to pick you up."

"Outside the Art Institute," I told her, dialling back the intensity. 

"Right. Don't do anything Yoda wouldn't do," Molly told me with an approximation of her usual spunk and cut the call.

"You raised a good kid, Michael," I said softly. The least I could do was figure out how to keep her from getting herself killed or mixed up in black magic. It's tempting at that age to think magic is the solution to everything, and you're usually stumbling around in such a haze of hormones and conflicting impulses that you don't think ahead to the consequences. I had been alone, betrayed, and ignorant; it was amazing I'd survived long enough for the choices I'd made to come back to haunt me. I was determined that Molly not be shackled to similar self-sabotage for the rest of her life.

I called my answering service next and jotted down the number Izabylle Washington had left for me yesterday. I still had some time and some change, so I called her, too. Making calls kept me busy and helped me ignore the recuperative effects all the delicious and tempting food-smells were having on my empty stomach. I didn't think the cops would be thrilled with letting me back in tonight

"Hello?"

"Izabylle Washington?"

"Yeah, that's me. Who're you?"

"This is Harry Dresden." 

I hastily jerked the phone back from my ear as Izabylle got rolling on a rant about my professionalism, manners, ancestry, and humanity. Well, what was I supposed to say? _Sorry, but I really need you to hire me because I'm already on the case?_

"Look," I said over her when it became apparent Izabylle wasn't going to wind down on her own anytime soon, "I'm sorry. I got tied up in Grant Park; I don't know if it's made it on the news yet."

Blessed silence on the other end of the line. "Sons of bitches got someone else, didn't they?"

"Yeah," I said. "I'd like to take your case, but I need to meet with you as soon as possible."

"I gotta get back to work; I already had to take time off."

"Where do you work? When do you get off?" I asked.

"Lagniappe. But I don't get off 'til like a hour after the Taste closes down."

"Wait, where are you right now?"

"Two blocks away from the park. Look, I don't have time to waste going all the way—"

"I'll come to you," I said. "Tall woman, dark hair, big stick. Are you on Adams or Madison?" I asked, looking down Adams for a black woman on a cellphone.

Izabylle sighed. "Madison."

Of course. 

"I'll be right there," I told her and put the phone back in the cradle.

Madison was two blocks away, and they were two of the busiest blocks in the city right now, in the middle of summer with an event in Grant Park. The second block was Millennium Park, and there was only a border of young trees between me and the face-fountain towers that most people think of when they think of Millennium Park. That or the Bean. I wasn't a big fan of the Bean, though. 

On top of that, Chicago foot traffic refuses to arrange itself in any kind of order. There's none of this stay-to-your-right nonsense you get in other cities, just pedestrians stomping around in unwieldy mobs. At intersections, one mob runs head-on into the mob going the other way in the middle of the street and the tourists and power-suits end up playing chicken with the strollers and college students and any car insane enough to try making a right turn.

I didn't—quite—end up running down the sidewalk, but my legs are so long that I can walk as fast as most people jog if I put a little effort into it. I won't say I thumped anyone with my staff either, but it does come in handy when you have to pry your way between people. I was fortunate in that the only street I had to cross was one of the ones blocked off for the Taste, except it was naturally full of people on their way to the Taste and I almost got pulled under by the riptide.

Madison doesn't connect through from Michigan Avenue to Lake Shore Drive; instead, it turns into a sort of pedestrian boulevard leading into Millennium Park and up to the big outdoor auditorium that looks like it lost a fight with an aluminum foil factory. When I got there, I stood by the large, motor-vehicle-discouraging flower bed and spun in a slow circle, trying to spot someone who looked like she was looking for someone, too. I could see the El tracks a few blocks away.

"Harry Dresden?"

I turned around. The tone of voice was belligerent and matched perfectly the expression of the short black woman in front of me. Her hair was an alarming shade of orange, shaved up the sides and with bangs falling all over her oval face, I assumed on purpose. It clashed—or was that contrasted?—with the blue tank top she was wearing, which was long and loose in the body and gathered almost below the hems of her jean shorts. She was carrying enough extra pounds to emphasise her curves even through the baggy shirt—I, who had barely had a figure before I got pregnant and still have no hips to speak of, was faintly jealous—and her unusually dark skin glowed with youth.

"That's me. You must be Izabylle." I put her at about Molly's age. Since the newspapers said Ayden Washington was ten years old, I figured her for sister and not mother.

"Talk fast."

We started back down the way I had come, moving almost as quickly. Izabylle didn't seem too concerned about keeping together. _I think I detect some misplaced anxiety._ Or properly-placed anger. A good clip for someone in sandals, anyhow.

"When was the last time you saw Ayden?" I asked.

"Two days ago, about one-thirty, quarter of. I had him for the day. He got bored, and I gave him some tickets to go get some food. I told him he was supposed to get his ass back to the stand by three, which is when I get my break, so I was gonna go around with him. I figured I'd see his lazy ass before that; boy never stood an hour in his life. But maybe he found somewhere to sit in the grass or down by the fountain, right?"

"You let him wander off alone when there had already been three kidnappings?"

"It was just for a hour, and there was supposed to be cops everywhere. Cops ought to be good for something, but I guess not. Besides, he had a cellphone," Izabylle said defensively. "Can't pry the damn thing away from him. He sends me stuff every couple minutes. Like, I thought I'd have my inbox full of pictures of fried food and fat white people or something."

"Did he leave you any messages?" I asked. I was starting to get a picture: harried older sister stuck with a kid who'd probably rather be playing videogames with his friends and too busy working to keep him entertained. Her mother probably blamed her, not entirely without justification, which would make it even harder for Izabylle to deal with her own feelings of guilt. The FBI wasn't getting anywhere with the case; things would be getting worse at home with fears and frustrations mounting and nothing to do but wait. More than enough motive for a young woman to take whatever money she could scrape together and hire a PI.

"Not a damn thing. I tried calling him, but it just didn't go through. FBI say they couldn't track the phone or nothing."

"That when you called the cops?"

"Well, some pervert _has_ been grabbing little boys. I'll tell you something; if a bunch of little white kids hadn't gotten theyselves snatched, cops'd just blow me off."

We turned the corner, approaching the entrance. "Can you remember anything unusual happening, either that morning or since the Taste started up? Anyone following you? Any bad feelings? Weird stuff happening? It might be something small," I added. "Appliances breaking down a lot or something."

Izabylle shook her head, digging a restaurant staff visor out of her purse—which was big enough her ten-year-old brother could probably have fit in it—and pulling it on.

"I don't know," she said, "but if one more person tells me the birds in Chicago are weird, I'm gonna beat them senseless with a frying pan."

"Just one more thing," I said as Izabylle made to use her privileges to cut in line.

"Yeah?"

"If you didn't think there was something strange—I mean, supernaturally—about your brother's disappearance, why did you come to me?"

"I didn't." It hadn't been too obvious before, but now that we'd stopped walking, I could tell that Izabylle was definitely avoiding meeting my eyes. "I went to the PI down the street, Nick Christian, and he told me go to you."

"Ah."

Izabylle looked up, and it was my turn to dodge her gaze. "I don't know from wizards, witches, any of that. Can you find my brother? He may be a whiney little brat, but I can't let anything happen to him."

"I'll do my best," I told her wide nose. "Tomorrow, bring something of his to work. Hair—" er, "—fingernail clippings, a toothbrush. Something he keeps with him a lot might work, too." A shame the FBI hadn't been able to locate that cellphone.

Izabylle, looking a lot more worried all of a sudden, nodded. "I'll get it."

"Good. I'll swing by tomorrow as early as I can. In the meantime, I'll see what I can get the FBI and police to cough up. They have a limited point of view which means that sometimes they miss things."  
__ __ __

I hurried back to the Art Institute—there wasn't any parking on this part of Michigan Avenue outside of an extortionist parking garage, which had a snowball's chance in hell of having a free spot right now anyway. You'd think the kidnappings would be scaring away more of the crowd.

Someone honked, which isn't so unusual in downtown Chicago; but they honked out the first five beats of _shave and a hair-cut_. I looked back down the line of cars and saw a familiar dark SUV.

Normally, I'm a bit sceptical about people who drive SUVs in the city; but Billy and Georgia did in fact haul that many people around on a regular basis. Actually, they'd be better off with a full-sized van, except then they'd _really_ never be able to find a parking space. All these people with Hummers and SUVs, I don't know where they _put_ them. I have enough trouble trying to wedge the Beetle into street parking.

I opened the door of an SUV driven by a long-faced woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a shiny new wedding ring on her left hand. Her dirty blonde hair, almost as uncooperative as my own, was pulled back from her face in a similar braid—but neater, since she had the full use of both hands. 

Georgia Borden was wearing a University of Chicago tee-shirt that read, _Where the only thing that goes down on you is your GPA._ I snorted involuntarily. That was almost as good as the one she and the other Alpha girls had given me at Maggie's baby shower and said, _It's like unprotected sex: you were glad you got in but sorry you came_. The University of Chicago is one of the best institutions of higher learning in the world, and situated smack-dab in the middle of the South Side. They have a strange sense of humour down there.

I'd often considered asking Georgia how she managed to be willowy instead of stick-like, but it really wouldn't fit with my image as badass magical mentor. Not that I'd been looking to become the Alphas' mentor; but they'd been more than eager to press me into the role, and from time to time it even helped me keep them out of trouble. Besides, I ought to be over whining about my looks by now.

Those last three inches of height I'd put on probably had something to do with it. When I'd finally hit my growth spurt and it just wouldn't stop, I'd been inclined to start slouching. But neither Justin nor Ebenezar was having any of that, so here I stood, sticking up out of the crowd like a ship's mast. 

"You really that eager for me to kill this thing again?" I asked Georgia.

"As long as no one bashes in all your windows at the impound lot, it shouldn't be for too long," she replied with equanimity. I winced, reminded of who had smashed them in last time and why, and what had happened to him. Namely, me. "Come on, get in before the light changes." 

Obediently, I got inside and buckled up. There was a tense moment after I closed the door when I wasn't certain the dinging mantra of _the door is ajar_ was going to stop again; but it did, and somewhere up ahead the light changed, and we started moving.

"Where to?" Georgia asked.

"My office," I said. I was in the middle of adjusting the cushy bucket seat, my head tilted back against the headrest to enjoy actual air-conditioning for once and less than eighty per cent humidity. Then I froze, my blood running cold for a different reason entirely.

Before I could freak out too much, my stomach growled. Bodily functions are a pain, but I've found they help me keep my feet in reality. "Uh. I could maybe eat something."

Georgia smiled knowingly, apparently unaware of my momentary panic attack. We stopped at Harold's and got about an entire fried chicken apiece. I tore into mine immediately. Georgia waited until she was done driving, pulling one of two wooden chairs up to the other side of my desk. She'd reassured me Maggie and Molly were secure behind my wards, and that Molly had promised to call Thomas immediately and not sit on anything until she changed out of her muddy clothes.

The new office was a bit smaller than my old one. My desk was on the long inner wall, on your left as you come in and facing the windows. The room had way too many windows. I'd installed some inconveniently short, battered filing cabinets against the wall on the other side of the desk; they were an unhealthy, seventies sort of dark green. Two mismatched armchairs were crammed into the corner beyond them on either side of a little end table with a chess board inlaid on the top, the pieces set up for a new game. I had a reading light on my desk, but with the blinds down most of the light came from two lamps across the room, which worked more reliably. There was a big cardboard box shoved in one corner that Maggie's toys and books might or might not make it back into when we cleared out for the day. 

I'd had to furnish it with fresh stuff, since my old building had been demolished—courtesy of Marcone—before I had a chance to find another. My desk, my filing cabinets, the table where I'd displayed my pamphlets (which had been replaced by a row of hanging wall files), my slightly lumpy easy chairs, the ancient plastic reed roll-up shades on the windows—all gone. 

I looked around, seeing it all in a different light now I knew Marcone had had my old building knocked down two years ago because the Red Court had planted explosives in the walls. It was a radical readjustment to my world view, and I was still acclimating. 

"So, are you going to tell me about this new case?" 

"Missing kids," I grunted. I leaned my staff in the corner where it would be within easy reach from the desk and set my blasting rod down between Georgia's grape soda and the phone.

"Oh my god. Those boys who are disappearing from the Taste?"

"Uh-huh. Gimme a sec," I told her. I dialled the phone. "Hey, Murph. It's me."

"Harry. Tell me you need a babysitter," Murphy greeted me.

"Can you feel the love?"

Murphy snorted.

"Relax; I'm just looking for some information. I've been hired to find one of the missing kids," I explained. "Do you think you could pull the file on the case for me? I'm not sure how much help the FBI is going to be."

"They weren't dazzled by your winning personality?" Murphy asked drily.

"Can you believe it?" I grinned.

"I go off-shift in an hour. I'll be over then."

"Thanks, Murph."

"Uh-huh." She hung up.

Looked like I had some time to kill, no leads, and no suspects. I reached for the phone again: time to attend to some other business. 

That morning, besides acquiring a reel of mental images for my next nightmare, I'd also received two messages: a request from my second mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, to find out why the Faeries weren't out kicking Red Court ass after what they'd pulled last fall and an even-more-inscrutable-than-normal note from the Gatekeeper. Which was saying something if you knew the Gatekeeper. It read only, _Look up_.

Yeah. Like I didn't have enough to be paranoid about already.

I had even less idea what to do about the Gatekeeper's note than the kidnappings. But past Faerie shenanigans had left me with a few contacts in both the Winter and Summer Courts. I called the least perilous of these: the Summer Knight, Fix.

Fix wasn't in a talking mood, which unsettled me a little. His caution was justifiable—or maybe he just didn't want to talk in front of whoever that was he'd been in bed with. My relationship with the current Summer Knight and Summer Lady had up to now been a good one. Anyway, I did manage to set up a meeting with him for the next morning. Fix hadn't been too happy about the timing, but if I didn't get lucky with a tracking spell on Trevor Abbascia tonight, I was going to have to spend all day watching for the sorcerer to make his move, which meant I was going to have to be on site.

I looked at the clock on the far wall—as far from me as I could get it, ditto the lamps, although the coffee machine was too close for its own good—and decided to call Nick Christian, my third mentor. He was the one who had taught me the detective end of things, more or less against his better judgement. We crossed paths on one of his cases while I was working as a dance partner in a senior citizen organisation, and I was so starved for intellectual stimulation I latched onto him like a drowning woman. 

Besides, there is only so long you can stand being groped by eighty-year-old men—or eighty-year-old women; you'd be surprised—before you start harbouring thoughts of euthanasia. Some of the old folks had had some interesting stories to tell, though. And it's the most television I've been able to watch since my magic manifested, even if it did skew heavily towards Dukes of Hazzard and M*A*S*H reruns. Explains a lot, right?

"Ragged Angel Investigations," Nick's gravelly voice, destroyed by years of alcohol and tobacco—firearms, too, but they didn't affect his vocal cords—answered after several rings. 

"Relax, it's only Harry," I told him. "Just calling to thank you for the referral."

Nick grunted. 

"What made you send her my way?" I asked. 

"If you say it's not up your alley, I'll take it back," Nick offered.

"No, but if I have to go pry information out of the FBI, I want to be as well-armed as possible."

"Ha. Suits."

"Yeah. Hey, you know a guy named Keithly?" I asked.

"Didn't you ever run into him?" Nick sounded surprised. "No, you were pretty allergic to cops, weren't you? He's a big-shot, been at this almost as long as I have. Use you if he thinks he can, but he doesn't like people getting in his way."

Georgia had finished her food by now and was politely pretending the armchair where she was reading one of my second-hand paperbacks was out of earshot. I fiddled with the phone cord.

"You never answered my question," I reminded Nick.

"A bunch of little stuff that doesn't add up, except they're almost all like that. And then there are the birds."

"Birds?" I repeated intently.

"No witnesses to the kidnappings, although a bunch of folks reported what turned out to be the parents dragging the kids around earlier in the day. But a lot of people complained about a flock of pigeons or crows buzzing the crowd sometime after the last time the boys were seen. A lot of times, they don't even know where they came from. I don't work your side of the street, but that's significant, right?"

"Yeah," I said, chewing on my lip. "Magic will disturb animals if it's black, or if it's big enough. And if what I saw today was any indication, what we've got here is both."

"I don't want to know anything about it," Nick said loudly. 

I grinned briefly. "Whatever you say. I'll let you know how it goes."

"Don't you dare." Nick punctuated this statement by hanging up.

I put the receiver back in its cradle. Georgia was watching me, book lying open on her lap. Her face, which was already predisposed to look sad, was far too grave for a newly-wed.

"So, how was the honeymoon?" I asked.

"I know you can't always tell us everything, like what happened last year," when a Black Court Vampire may or may not have blackmailed me into saving civilisation as we know it using pictures of Karrin Murphy blasting a Renfield with a sawed-off shotgun while standing next to Gentleman Johnny Marcone—ironically, it had been the same vampire we went in to kill in the first place, "but I speak for everyone when I say that if you think there's anything we can do to help, we want to do it."

"That bad, huh?" I said. "Well, all those tropical beaches, you're bound to get sunburn in some uncomfortable places."

Georgia, who was so tanned you could almost mistake her race if it weren't for her hair colour, flashed me a smile. "You know, my psych textbooks call humour an interrupted defence mechanism."

"That was Larry Niven." 

"Quoting Doctor Vaillant."

I sagged back in my office chair. "Not like there's much to tell yet anyway. More information, that's the ticket."

I grabbed pen from my desk drawer and started laying out what facts I had on a half-full legal pad. Murphy should be by before much longer, and then I was going to have to go bug the Feds again. I could bug Marcone to bug the Feds, I supposed, but only if I were truly desperate. I had barely started investigating, I reminded myself. The kind of things I was looking for probably wouldn't show up in FBI reports anyway. I was used to doing my own legwork. But the Taste was only going to last four more days; after that finding the culprit—not to mention the kids—was going to get even harder.

Georgia went out into the hall to call Billy. She got a privately pleased look on her face when she mentioned him, one that sat somewhat at odds with my memory of her nearly ripping out Jenny Greenteeth's throat on the altar for impersonating her groom. It might be nice to have someone feel that way about me. I supposed I'd come close a couple times, but nothing had stuck.

Recent indiscretions aside, I was pretty good at ignoring my girl-parts and getting down to work. So it was working very industriously that Murphy found me when she showed up.

"You keeping a bodyguard now, Harry?" Murphy asked, slipping through the door and shutting it behind her. "Looks like they got you anyway."

I picked my head up from where it had tipped back, in aid of my examination of the plaster ceiling, only then noticing the continued absence of both Georgia and the book she'd been reading. My fingers twitched guiltily.

"My car got towed. Georgia's offered to chauffeur: she needs the practice. You know, since you can't actually get work with a post-graduate degree these days."

"I heard. I also heard you had another run-in with Marcone today. You working for his mafia friend from Youngstown?" Murphy asked, her voice acquiring a distinct edge. She was carrying several manila file folders held together with a rubber band.

"Is that where he's from? You'd think it would be someplace more exciting," I said. "And why is everyone assuming I work for Marcone today? You and your ex. I thought those rumours died out years ago."

"You met Rick, huh?"

I nodded. "Down at the crime scene. He's a real charmer."

"Isn't he though?

"I'm looking for Ayden Washington," I said. "A PI I know sent his sister to me, noticed something smelled about the case."

"What?" Murphy asked.

"Birds," I said. "Of course, birds are kind of smelly anyway."

Murphy set the folders on top of the dismembered newspapers currently occupying my desk. I leaned forward through the almost liquid air and pulled the rubber band off with a snap, flipping open the topmost.

"It's all I could get. SI isn't working this one; too high-profile, especially now. The commissioner wants people who know what they're doing."

I recognised the sour note in Murphy's voice. Special Investigations got stuck with the shittiest assignments, the ones that were too unglamourous for Homicide or Major Case, and anything too obviously preposterous—i.e. supernatural—that the Department wanted swept under the carpet. It was a thankless job, dealing with things the rest of the world didn't want to admit even existed and then having to cover it up so no one had to think about anything that might pop their cosy little bubble of denial. Being assigned as head of SI was essentially a career death sentence. 

Murphy had thrown it back in her bosses' faces. But it wasn't, you know, unstressful.

"If you want anything more, you're going to have to ask the FBI."

"It's better than nothing, which is what this case has been so far. Thanks, Murph."

"Don't thank me yet," Murphy said. "I skimmed through those before I came over. I'm pretty sure you've still got a lot of nothing."

"And birds, Murph. Don't forget the birds."

Murphy snorted. "Well, let me know if you need backup." 

"Is there some reason none of you will trust me to take care of myself?" I complained.

"Experience?" Murphy suggested.

"Ouch."

"Truth hurts." Murphy shrugged.

"Send my bodyguard in on your way out," I told her.

Murphy flashed a grin. "Sure."


	3. Chapter 3

I persuaded Georgia to sit in a chair while I went through the files. Murphy was right: there wasn't much there, but I went over them carefully, twice, before I had Georgia drive me over to the local FBI offices. The car behind us followed us as we turned off the main road, but kept on going towards the other end of the parking lot.

"Wait here," I told Georgia.

Georgia, who had always been better at following orders than Billy—or maybe it was just that Billy always preferred a frontal assault—pursed her lips on any objections. It turned out it was a good thing, at least for her, since as soon as I got past the front desk I found myself in an interrogation room. I sighed. I _really_ hate breaking in new cops. 

They left me in there to stew. I mulled over the facts, again. My next stop ought to be home to consult with Bob the Skull; maybe this jumble would mean more to him than it did to me. That was why I kept him around, after all. And I wanted to check on Maggie. Thomas was more than capable of protecting her, I knew; but someone was _snatching children_. As long as this sorcerer was running around out there somewhere, I wouldn't be easy in my own mind as long as Maggie was out of my sight.

I wasn't even properly appreciating the air-conditioning, because every time I started to enjoy it I remembered Lasciel and tensed up again. I ended up meditating a little just to interrupt the cycle. I considered getting up on the table and doing the full-lotus thing, just to be a bitch, but I reluctantly concluded that that probably wouldn't produce the results I was looking for. I wondered how well their recording equipment was holding up.

Some time later, I heard the door open and close. When I opened my eyes, Agent Rick and his magic eight ball tie were in the room with me. 

"So am I a suspect, or are they painting your office?" I asked.

Rick pulled out a chair on the other side of the generic metal table and sat down. "I don't have an office; I have a desk. New guy."

"Digs are still a step up from, what was it? New Orleans police station?"

Rick waggled a hand back and forth. "Can't complain, though. Hey, what say we get down to business?"

"Okay. I want access to everything you've come up with on the missing kids," I said.

"And why should I do that?" Rick asked. 

"Because you're not getting anywhere with this case. It's becoming a media disaster. You've probably got everyone from the mayor and the governor on down breathing down your neck. Do you have any idea how much tourist revenue the Taste generates? And now you've got the mob involved."

"I _did_ grow up in Chicago, thanks," Rick said. "You still haven't told me what you can do that I can't. Have any luck with that crystal ball?"

I controlled a surge of irritation. "I've got ways of looking into things you don't. Contacts who won't speak to you, or vice-versa."

"Like Gentleman Johnny?"

" _Johnny_ and I...know to walk softly around each other. It keeps the collateral damage down." 

Well, sometimes. And boy, did I not want anyone examining my relationship with Marcone too closely. Not now, of all times. You see, the thing about operating outside the law was that you lost its protection. No one had elected Marcone. He didn't have notarised contracts or fancy titles for half the things he was into so he could sue you if you welched. In Marcone's business, what protects you is your reputation. It's all about face. I could sometimes get Marcone to act rationally so long as no one was looking; but he'd made it clear that if I ever faced off against him in public, he wouldn't be able to back down.

I didn't know what Marcone would do if the feds started asking him why he paid so much attention to me, which would undoubtedly prompt his associates to start wondering, too. I was pretty sure I wouldn't like it, though. And Marcone wouldn't like it if I stood up and contradicted him, and neither of us would like where things went from there.

Which brought me back here, to this room, painfully conscious of the fact that I suck at strategy. I was starting to hate Lisa Murphy a bit, too. 

"Look," I tried. "I'm just a PI; I have a dingy office and everything. I bet there's even some gum stuck to the bottom of my shoe. I'm on the case anyway; you don't even have to hire me. If I strike out, no risk to the Bureau. If I turn something up—"

"—we look like idiots," Rick pointed out.

I snorted. "Please. No one ever believes me. And what am I, going to rush into wherever alone and haul out six kids single-handed?" I waved my gloved left hand, which when left to its own devices still curled a little, slightly claw-like. I'd left staff and blasting rod in Georgia's SUV so they wouldn't get confiscated. I didn't like running around unarmed, but I liked the idea of having to make new ones even less. And how likely was it that vampires were going to try to assassinate me in here anyway? "We all want those boys back."

Rick eyed me thoughtfully for a minute, then got up and disappeared through the door again with a noncommittal _wait here_. Thus, I waited. 

Before I had a chance to get really good and bored again, Rick poked his head back in. "Follow me."

I beamed at Rick. He looked sour. "Any of this leaks to the press, I'll have you arrested for obstruction."

"I think I liked you better when you were the good cop," I quipped.

Rick glared me through a doorway into a bullpen. The desks were all either second-hand or original equipment. Rick's was near a wall of offices. I knew it was Rick's desk because there was a framed picture on it of him and Murphy's-baby-sister-Lisa. Or at least, it better have been Lisa, because if he was having his picture taken holding some other woman in what looked more like a collection of knotted strings than a bathing suit, Clan Murphy was going to ritually dismember him. She was, I have to admit, an extraordinarily good-looking woman.

There was also a computer with fish swimming around on the screen. I hoped Rick wasn't too attached to it.

Rick pushed a stack of files at me. I started leafing through them immediately.

"We don't have much. No witnesses, no signs of struggle, no bodies turning up..."

"No one selling meat pies," I muttered.

"Horror convention's out by O'Hare," said a large black woman who had just come out of an office a couple doors down. "Rick, Hailey wants to see you."

"I'll be right there," Rick told her, then turned to me. "You can look over the files, but nothing leaves the building."

"Yeah, yeah." I flopped into Rick's chair, just for the look on his face. If I'd had a camera, I'd have taken a picture for Murphy. 

"Let me guess: you two used to date," the woman—she had a photo-ID lanyard, so I assumed she was another agent—said, sounding more amused than hostile.

"I'm friends with his ex-wife, the current sister-in-law."

"Solidarity."

"Something like that. Harry Dresden, by the way." I offered my good hand. 

She came over to shake it. "Special Agent Peyton Tracey. I'm working with Keithly and Schnur on this one."

"Any staggering insights?" I asked hopefully.

"Read the files," Tracey told me.

I did. Overall, they said the same things as Murphy's police files only in more detail and with lots of incomprehensible lab reports. But then, you could pick up the basic facts by reading a newspaper. One kid kidnapped each day since the Taste opened. Different times, different places. All boys between the ages of six and eleven. But, as any investigator worth his salt will tell you, the devil is in the details.

Reading through the interrogation transcripts, a few things became apparent. As much as some of the parents tried to smoke it, the kids were all brats. A lot of the parents were real winners, too. 

More birds, although it was probably less that they were birds specifically than that pigeons and seagulls—and to a lesser extent crows, ravens, and songbirds—are the only group animals really common in a city. I remembered the image of a bird startled into flight from the middle of the crowd, preserved perfectly by my Third Eye.

Of course, that didn't explain what a falcon had been doing in the middle of a crowd of people like that. On the ground. I couldn't believe I hadn't realised how strange it was before; blast Marcone for fogging my mind. Distractions like that could get me killed.

There had been something else... I paged back through the files—there. An eight-year-old girl who insisted an owl had flown at her head at about the same time the first boy's mother had noticed he was gone. You had to give it to the FBI, they were thorough. The attached notes said the girl had been carrying around a copy of Chamber of Secrets, though, so no one had taken her too seriously.

The FBI were hoping really hard that, because all the boys were problem children, and since no bodies had turned up anywhere, there was a good chance the kidnapper was some sort of insane disciplinarian and they were all still alive somewhere. Knowing what I did about the things that could happen to bodies and how they might end up places the law would never find them, I was less confident. Kids. Whoever this sorcerer was, whatever he was doing, he was using black magic. On kids. 

I was going to find him and take him apart.

It took me a minute to notice that the flickering of the lights wasn't the same pattern you get with flame—it was the twitching of fluorescent bulbs about to give up the ghost. Stars and stones, I needed to calm down or I was going to blow out the whole building. And as many warm and fuzzy experiences as I've had with the FBI, it was probably better to have Keithly and company—Rick included—on the case than not. 

I committed a couple of addresses to memory and closed the files. Having a fallen angel in the back of my head, as long as I was stuck with it, had its uses—for example, Lasciel had a photographic memory. But I preferred not to go there if there was any alternative. It was a slippery slope, after all. 

The fish had stopped swimming on Rick's computer monitor. Maybe they'd gotten tired. According to the clock on the wall, it was getting late; I felt a twinge for Georgia, abandoned outside all this time. Oops.

Rick had been watching me, alternately chatting with the agent whose desk he was leaning against and talking to his cellphone. Stars, newly-weds everywhere I turned. Actually, I thought Murphy had said something about the wedding being last year. He came over when I stood up.

"Find everything you needed?" 

"Well, I'm still short about six kids," I said.

"You really think you're funny, don't you?" Rick said.

"I'm just a barrel of laughs," I agreed flatly. "Ask anyone."

Rick tried to catch my eyes, but I've had lots of practice at avoiding eye-contact and eventually he gave up. "Well, you got your information. But word to the wise, I'd stay out from underfoot."

"Let you know if I find anything," I told him, smiling falsely, and brushed past.

It was dusk outside, dark enough the streetlights had come on. I handed in my visitor's pass at the front desk, keeping a careful eye out for suspicious movement in the parking lot on the other side of the airy glass window-wall. There was a dark, late-model sedan with tinted windows idling in front of the main entrance. 

"I feel a headache coming on," I grumbled under my breath, shaking my shield bracelet out and feeling the lack of my blasting rod like a missing tooth, and went out anyway.

Yup. Definitely a headache. And it was me it had been waiting for, because as soon as I stepped outside, Hendricks climbed out of the car. 

"I swear, I have no idea what happened to your snausage. My dog has a more refined palate." That was a blatant lie. Mouse was as much of a philistine as I was.

"Boss wants to see you," Hendricks grunted.

"Gee, really? I never would have guessed."

"Just get in the car."

"My dad always warned me never to get into cars with mafia hit-men," I said and started walking again.

Hendricks blocked my path.

"Out of my way, Cujo."

"He said to tell you he got what you asked for."

I narrowed my eyes and drew in my irritation. On the one hand, Marcone did have something I needed. He probably even thought he was being polite. On the other hand, he knew just as well as I did that there were cameras outside the FBI building, plus the agent-receptionist behind the desk in that big glass vestibule. I'd really rather they not see me hop into a mob-mobile.

"Hexus," I growled.

Hendricks tensed, but I wasn't aiming for him. I was aiming for his car. Its low rumble grew suddenly strained, then ground to a stop. It was probably pushing my luck: hand to hand, Hendricks could kick my ass; and while I could use magic to defend myself, I had to be really careful about it where vanilla mortals were concerned. For a bunch of hide-bound old curmudgeons, the White Council doesn't really have that many written rules. There are only seven, as a matter of fact. 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' tops the list. If I killed someone with magic, _I'd_ be the one kneeling in that warehouse with a bag over my head. Again.

Engine blocks were fair game, though. Hendricks' slow scowl as he worked out what I'd just done gave me a warm, tingling glow. I watched serenely while he tried unsuccessfully to restart the car, then popped the hood. He looked wonderfully frustrated.

"Hey, what luck you're in the FBI lot. I'm sure you'll be really safe here." I didn't smile so much as bare my teeth. "Where did you say Marcone was?"

Georgia, more experienced in the vicissitudes of life around wizards, ended a call on her cellphone before I made it to where she'd parked. She was leaning against the SUV, and I realised she'd been watching our little dog-and-pony show, ready to jump in on my side, with fangs if need be.

"He's been waiting there for half an hour," Georgia said.

"He's going to be waiting a bit longer," I told her cheerfully.  
__ __ __

We drove to a parking lot off the Lakefront Trail, not far from Grant Park. It was pretty good going until we got into the Taste traffic, but the lot was almost empty. It was fully dark now, as dark as it gets in the middle of a city, which is to say the sky was a weird purple-tinged umber and you could maybe see Venus at apogee. In the neighbourhood where my apartment was, you could see maybe a half-dozen stars on a clear night. 

I caught glimpses of a white car behind us. I wasn't sure, but I thought it might have been the same one I'd seen earlier that evening. Oh, goody. 

Whoever it was either wasn't very experienced or wasn't bothering to be subtle. I watched in the rear-view mirror; sure enough, my new friend exited behind us, although this time he didn't follow us into the parking lot.

"Do me a favour," I told Georgia before I got out. "I think someone's been following us, a white car."

"Yeah, I noticed him." 

I blinked. "You did?"

Georgia gave me a pitying look. "I'm not _new_ at this, Harry. You want I should draw him off?"

I shook my head. "I want you to be careful. Stay on the main roads. See if he follows you. Call in backup before you stop anywhere if he does; I don't want you getting hurt."

"And if he's following you?"

"Contrary to popular opinion, I can take care of myself. Go. I'll call you tomorrow."

Georgia frowned, but she nodded. I took my tools and watched her drive away. Then I turned my attention to the other car in the empty lot, another SUV. As I walked over, the passenger's side door opened and Marcone got out. He stared after Georgia, an expression of wry resignation on his face.

"Since you are here, I can only assume you received my invitation," he said in his. "I do hope you left Mister Hendricks in one piece."

"The only damage was to his ego. He's back at the FBI offices. Don't worry; he's broken down, not arrested. Well, probably," I hedged. "Depending on what you keep in your cars." And presumably the FBI had already restrained itself from arresting him earlier in the day.

"Dare I ask?"

"I didn't like his attitude."

The corners of Marcone's lips twitched fractionally. I glared at him.

"Don't you even start. You got something for me, Marcone?"

I regretted my choice of words almost immediately, when an alarming light flashed in Marcone's eyes. I held them levelly until Marcone turned to get something from the interior of the SUV.

He came out with a generic plastic comb in a plastic bag. I held it up to the light and saw several fine, dark hairs caught between the teeth.

"The kid's?" I asked.

"Yes."

I grunted, looked around, and leaned my staff against one of the side-mirrors. My blasting rod was jammed into my back pocket, so I had a hand free to dig out a tiny end of chalk.

Crouching down, I used it to draw a circle around myself. Then I removed a few hairs from the comb and handed the bag back to Marcone. I closed the circle around myself with a small effort of will. 

This tracking spell was one I used a lot. I had used it only a few weeks ago, for example, to locate Georgia's Billy when he was abducted by faeries on his wedding day. I was hoping this time whatever we found on the other end would be less dramatic, though.

"Interessari, interressarium," I murmured, ignoring Marcone's intent presence and releasing my carefully-shaped will. Energy flowed between me and the short hairs I held to my forehead. 

I scuffed the chalk line, breaking the circle. The spell leapt out, tugging at me to follow. It settled, a faint pressure above my right ear. 

I opened my eyes and stood, turning to centre it. Something was wrong.

"Hey Marcone," I said. "You got a boat?"

"I have access to several. Why?"

I pointed out over Lake Michigan. "The kid's that way."


	4. Chapter 4

We were actually in a harbour parking lot, but I guess it wasn't the right harbour. Or maybe Marcone just didn't want to risk me dinging up his fancy yacht. I was sure he had a fancy yacht; it was pretty much required. Anyway, we walked up the shoreline to the next one up. Just the two of us. Alone. Together. Again. I'd half-expected Gard, although I wasn't sure whether she'd be acting as magical backup or chaperone. Come to think of it, why hadn't Marcone put Gard on this and told me to go whistle for my own sample of bodily residue?

I asked Marcone this. He'd been holding in any commentary of his own, I guess thinking I needed to focus on the spell. And I did, a little, but this kind of thing is easy for me and, as I said, I've had a lot of practice. His talking was a lot less distracting than his undressing me with his eyes, anyway. I wondered if he'd be so eager to see me naked if he had a clue how banged up I was. Bullet scars, knife scars, burns—my left hand didn't look like like a charcoal stick anymore, and I could use it again, for a limited value of the word 'use'; but it still wasn't very pretty—stretch-marks. Although those last were fading faster than the scars, for whatever reason. Hey, I wasn't about to complain.

Of course, Marcone undoubtedly had scars of his own—

"She's currently involved in another project. Fortunately for you; I don't imagine she'd have taken your little prank with Mister Hendricks in good part."

My eyebrows shot up at that. Marcone had his pet valkyrie on something that couldn't be interrupted for what I was sure the criminal underworld would see as as humungous a violation of guest-rights as the supernatural one would have. The mind boggled.

Unless he was just smoking me. He might have had another lead, and while I was definitely on board with getting the kids back and had no problem kicking any sorcerous ass that presented itself, I'm no assassin. If I kill something, it's because it's already trying pretty hard to kill me.

The boat Marcone took us to wasn't huge, but it was sleek and modern. For some reason, I was reminded of a phrase my apprentice had introduced to my vocabulary: this is why we can't have nice things. 

At least it wasn't a speedboat. Water has a disruptive effect on magic, but I still wouldn't take the odds of the engine dying with me sitting on top of it with an active spell. It was apparently still a one-man rig, though, because Marcone hadn't made any calls and I sure as hell didn't know anything about boats except which part went in the water.

"No change?" Marcone asked. 

"Nope."

I stood back and watched Marcone familiarly going through the motions of casting off and steering us out onto open water like it was something he'd done a thousand times before. Idly, I wondered if he actually enjoyed boating, or if it was just a part of the image. Marcone struck me more as a pirate than the kind of guy who races sailboats with a sweater tied around his shoulders, no matter what he looked like.

I had to focus more on the spell now anyway. Like I said, water disrupts magic, grounds it out in a way the other elements just don't. You can do water magic, but it takes a particular touch, and it's still easier when you're not actually on or touching it. Water is dense like earth but like air holds no shape of its own. And there's something about water. Sunlight, especially sunrise, wears down magical constructs, too; but moving water's faster. It's cleansing. Restorative. There's a lot of water-related symbolism involving rebirth and purification; you find it in almost every culture on the planet. Because of the nature of magic, it's impossible to tell if all that symbolism is a reflexion of properties innate to the element or their cause. Either way, it's there.

Once we'd cleared the harbour, I pointed and Marcone turned the big wheel. It got darker the further out we got from shore, and the stars started peeking out. I had just opened my mouth to ask Marcone whether he was expecting us to throw down with whoever or if this was just a reconnaissance mission when the pull of pressure changed directions twice in about a second and a half.

"Woa!" I exclaimed. "Back up."

"Is he moving?" Marcone asked, already heeling us around. 

"Not unless he's found a way to instantaneously teleport to the other side of the lake." I pointed again. "Go slow."

"Please explain."

"Keep your pants on." There was an explanation, but I didn't like it. Forcing down a sensation of creeping dread, I poured all my attention into the spell, holding it together against the water's constant fraying while we circled in closer. At last, I felt the gentle tugging swing around. "Stop."

"Your spell didn't work. There's nothing here."

I took a step and a half back. _There._

"I _really_ have to go back and rejigger this spell. Hell's bells," I said, more to myself than Marcone. 

" _Harry._ "

"It works like I told you before. Orients off the points of the compass, tells you which way to go. Except I don't really get up and down until I'm right on top of the target."

There was a horrible pause before Marcone spoke. "Are you telling me that Trevor Abbascia is at the bottom of the lake?"

Marcone's voice could have taught glaciers a thing or two about freezing. The short hairs at the back of my neck were sticking up, but then they'd been doing that ever since we stopped moving. I touched the pocket where I'd put the Gatekeeper's note. Hell's bells.

"Look up."

With the engine turned off, it was eerily silent. No helicopter hovering overhead, even if you could get one to stay up indefinitely. How had anyone even gotten a human child up there? It was hard to say exactly, but I thought the spot where the trail dead-ended was higher than the highest point on the tallest ship that plied Lake Michigan.

I extended my magical senses. It was a good thing we'd come out tonight: without an actual body at the other end of the spell to anchor it there was nothing to connect _to_ , and dawn would destroy any traces left in the air. 

A shadow passed across a patch of stars. Ever so faintly, I caught a whiff of a half-familiar acrid smoke just before Marcone hit me.

My shoulder slammed into the deck, staff going out from under me at the same time as my legs. I felt it go skittering out of reach even as Marcone landed on top of me.

"Ack! Marcone, you perverted creep, get your hands off of me!"

I tried to roll him, but despite being shorter Marcone outweighs me by about forty pounds and he had all kinds of advantage in leverage from his current position. 

"Hell's bells, is this _really_ the best time for this?" I snarled.

Before I got my hand half burned off, I'd started learning aikido and staff fighting from Murphy, who has several trophies on a shelf in her office to prove she knows what she's doing. Now, I took my apprentice with me; the discipline was good for her, and it was teaching her some humility, too. Molly was already hands-down better at this stuff than I was, even taking my handicap into consideration, but I'd picked up a few things.

Marcone rolled me underneath him instead, his front to my back. He was saying something, but I wasn't listening. I reared back and slammed my head into his face just in time to see a dark, spread-winged shape swoop in for a second attack.

"Holy shit! Did you see that?"

"Keep your head down," Marcone told me, fitting actions to words, although his big had pressed instead of slamming.

"I got it, I got it." My rattled brain started catching back up with events. My left arm was trapped beneath me. "Ease up a little, would you?" 

"Ah, welcome back. Can I trust you not to do something ill-advised now?"

I rolled my eyes. "I'm just going to put up a shield. I need my arm back."

Marcone shifted his weight enough to let me wiggle my arm free and shake out the bracelet of small kite-shaped shields made from various metals encircling my left wrist. He was still covering my body with his own, breathing warmly and heavily on the back of my neck. I pushed the distraction aside and focussed.

I was still getting used to the shield that snapped into existence around us both, a whorl of colours that resolved into a silver dome. I got it up just in time. Something hit the barrier I'd erected, hard and fast. Marcone didn't flinch, but I could feel him tense when the projectile exploded into a blob of ectoplasm, like a bug on a windshield.

"I need to get to the wheel," Marcone said. 

More impacts hammered the shield, which flared brightly in reaction. "I'll come with."

When Marcone came to his feet, he brought me with him. I got the impression he was moving more slowly than he normally would have, uncertain of how quickly the shield would adjust. The silver dome expanded around us into a sphere, but it was just as well Marcone was staying close; the new shield was tougher than the old one in more than one sense of the word. The impacts were getting more frequent as we crossed the few steps to the wheelhouse.

As soon as we got there, I dropped the shield, sagging, and Marcone sprang into action. It took him half a dozen tries before the engine turned over, birds hitting the wheelhouse like hailstones. There were already cracks in the windshield. I was starting to have visions of what would happen if we got stranded out here all night when the engine finally caught and we shot off like a bat out of hell.

"That's new," Marcone commented with all the composure of a man discussing the selection at his local Safeway. "I hadn't had a chance to ask about it."

I glanced down at my new shield bracelet. For nearly two years, I'd been making do with the one that had gotten slagged going after Mavra. The old one had been made entirely from silver and designed to stop a limited range of attacks, mainly kinetic energy, with or without a physical projectile riding the wave, hence the current state of my left hand.

The new version featured a braided chain and shield charms made from silver, iron, copper, nickel, and brass. It had a hell of a lot more stopping power, effective against a broad spectrum of energy and stimuli. The trade-off was in the energy required to keep it going. Holding it in a complete sphere around the both of us out in the open like that while we were getting pounded had taken a lot out of me.

"Yeah, I finally got enough dexterity back for fine work." I demonstrated my dexterity by more or less folding in all my fingers but one.

"I think you were right; this isn't the time," Marcone said mildly.

Just then, the windshield shattered in a shower of safety glass and ectoplasm. The birds were keeping pace with us, which made sense if you considered that since they were exploding into ectoplasm, they were constructs and not real birds at all. Unfortunately, that makes very little difference when they're trying to peck your eyes out.

"Down!" I shouted, and had to hope Marcone obeyed. 

I brought my arms up to shield my face, backpedalling frantically over the slippery deck until I hit the far wall. Aim is a generous word for what I did before I triggered my force ring, but it did the job. I shaped my shield into a curved plane where the windshield had been.

Marcone rose from a defensive crouch, thankfully not knocked out. He raked ectoplasmy hair out of his face with one hand, gaze shifting rapidly between the dashboard, my shield, and me.

"How long can you hold that?"

I eyed the glitter of the skyline, already being obscured again, and set my jaw. "Not very long."

Marcone gave me a short little nod. "I'll dispense with the evasive manoeuvres, then." And we put on a burst of speed that almost knocked me off my feet. The shield flickered, but I grit my teeth and it solidified again.

I hoped there was nothing else out here on the water with us, because between the—were those actually _seagulls_?—mobbing us and the near-continuous flashes of light the shield was giving off, it was next to impossible to see where we were going. I wasn't even bothering to look. I should have been trying to locate the person behind the attack, but the reek of black magic like a clinging pall of smoke in the air was so thick it made me almost nauseous. Or maybe that was just Marcone's driving. 

Even though we were moving a lot faster than we had on the way out, I wasn't sure we were going to make it. For one thing, the shield was hard enough to hold together over water, even without things crashing into it constantly. For another, the engine was making loud thunking sounds, and I'm no expert on boats, but I didn't think those dials on the console were supposed to be spinning around like that.

"Tell me we're getting close," I panted. The air was filled with enraged shrieks and the sound of beating wings.

"Hang on."

"Hell's bells. Marcone, I'm losing it!"

I dropped the shield and gathered my will before my body could realise how exhausted it was. I just hoped we were close enough to swim for shore. If I was really lucky, I'd take out the sorcerer as well as the engine, but I wasn't counting on it. "Forzare!"

Ectoplasm sheeted through the air outside, clinging to a handful of real birds, which dropped like stones amid the rain-like patter of the translucent jelly. The engine cut out.

"Hang on!" Marcone shouted.

I jerked my gaze back down to see what was going on. We were headed straight for the breakwater outside the marina. The engine might have stopped working, but we'd been going pretty fast; I didn't think we were going to stop in time.

I grabbed Marcone, but instead of following instructions, I dragged him out of the wheelhouse. "Come on!"

Marcone took being manhandled better than I had. I let go of him to scoop up my fallen staff and he kept going until he reached the side.

When he showed signs of stopping short, I slipped my off-arm through his and dragged him forward again. "Trust me!"

I thumped my staff against the deck on one step and twisted around on the next, aiming behind me.

"Ventas servitas!"

I was digging deep and in kind of a hurry, and scared half out of my mind because that last shot apparently hadn't taken out the as-yet-unseen spellcaster after all and the next wave was closing in. So I think I can be forgiven for slightly mis-estimating the amount of power I needed to pour into the spell.

Marcone and I went flying across the rapidly closing gap and right over the breakwater. Dark water gaped below, ready to swallow us whole. If we landed in the harbour now, I didn't much like our chances of living to see sunrise. If we were lucky, maybe we'd be taken to wherever the kids were being kept. But more likely we'd just end up bird-food.

I swirled the wind around us, dredging my terror for the will to angle it just enough so that we landed on the dock instead of taking a bath. We had at least gained some distance on the wreck of gulls, but both of us were eager to get under cover: we were running again almost before we regained our balance. If I remembered right, there should have been a building somewhere along here, right on the shoreline. Provided we could make it to shore.

We were halfway down the dock when the birds caught up with us. I cursed myself for leaving my magically reinforced leather duster at home, although that wouldn't have done Marcone any good. I was at least not one of those girls who go around wearing scandalously short shorts as soon as the temperature reaches sixty-five degrees—and given the ratio of my waist-circumference to thigh-length, most shorts are scandalously short on me. Or at least show a lot more leg than I'm really comfortable with. Nope, it's blue jeans all the way—well, right now actually cargo pants, in deference to the weather and the utility of extra pockets. I'm not a purse girl. Anyhow, replacing clothes that get mauled by vampires and stained by demonic fluids is expensive enough without shelling out for an entire summer wardrobe. 

I blasted the birds back again—the zone of destruction reached less than half as far this time—and stretched into a sprint. Marcone kept up; I was reluctantly impressed. We hit dry land almost in step, swerving together around raised brick flower beds and potted shrubs, and slapped the side of the building like it was home plate. 

The gulls mobbed us. With the last dregs of my power, I raised another shield, snarling at Marcone, "Get the door open!"

I held the shield as long as I could—a subjective eternity, but it couldn't have been more than a minute before it faltered and died. I had only lasted this long by calling on hellfire, which didn't smell any better than the sorcerer's smog of tainted magic, and I called more of it now as the next shrieking gull flung itself at my face, making the runes on my blasting rod glow red.

A knife went sailing past my head, pithing the gull in a way anyone who's ever encountered the air-borne vermin has dreamed of. An arm hooked around my waist, hauling me backwards through the doorway. I felt the muscles of Marcone's torso flex as he threw a second knife. I had the lingering presence of mind to reach up and grab the security grate, which gave us time to get the door closed. 

"Birds?" Marcone rasped.

I shook my head. "Constructs. Someone's watched one too many Hitchcock movies, looks like."

"Some of those weren't exploding."

"No," I agreed. 

I looked around, my eyes adjusting to the dimness. We were in what amounted to a large kitchen with a cash register up front. That new Chinese place, right. Outdoor seating only.

The glass door thumped and rattled. "Does this place have a chimney?" I wondered aloud.

Marcone ignored that. "Is there anything you can do?"

"Well, we've got a kitchen," I said, forcing myself back into motion. "I can probably whip up something temporary. Um, I'm gonna need salt. Lots of salt."

I wasn't exorcising a ghost, but salt is a mineral, so it's more or less all one thing; it's got all sorts of associations with purification; and any restaurant will have loads of it. A quick rummage turned up the rest of what I'd need: a bowl, a selection of herbs and spices, and a bottle of red wine. 

"Cooking wine," Marcone pronounced, looking at the label.

"You don't have to drink it; it's standing in for blood. Unless you'd prefer to donate a pint for the cause?"

Marcone actually seemed to consider that. Stars and stones. "There's something very wrong with you, has anyone ever told you that?"

"You have, on more than one occasion."

A particularly loud thump-rattle shook the security door. _Bait Marcone later_. "Whatever. Let's get to work."

I instructed Marcone to spread the salt thickly at the bottom of each door to the outside while I mixed what smelled mostly like a good dry-rub in the bowl. Next, I had him pour the wine liberally over the salt. 

Moving to what looked like more or less the centre of the room, I scooped a handful of mixed spices out of the bowl and stood back from the counter. Marcone spread more salt and wine around me in a circle, which I bent to close with my will. A very little wine wetting the spices. A dab of both on my tongue. 

I closed my eyes, letting the fire spread down from my tongue to my stomach and out to the rest of me, the reverse of the path the spell would follow. Carefully, I shaped it in my mind. It had been a long day, and while this wasn't a huge spell, it would have to last for a while. I drew on my worry for Maggie, at home with Thomas; for Thomas, whom I'd hardly seen lately except for handing the Scamp back and forth. My outrage at this sorcerer, perverting magic and stealing children from their families. For once, instead of pushing it from my mind, I tapped the perverse, electric _thing_ between me and Marcone, the way his watching me right now made my heart pound uncomfortably in my ears and a different warmth suffuse my extremities.

Cupping the wine-damped mixture in both hands now, I raised it to my lips. " _Obexicis_." I didn't speak the word so much as blow it into the mound of powder as I released the spell. 

It billowed out in a rich-smelling cloud, encountering the salt circle and expanding it, pushing outward until it met the outer wall. When the spell came into contact with the salt mounded at the bases of the doors, it threw the white grains upward in sheets, completely covering them.

I sagged against a counter. "Well. That should hold us for a while."

"How long?" Marcone rumbled. I couldn't see his eyes, but something in his voice made me shiver. He was just one more shadow in the darkness. He raised one hand as if to touch the salt-encrusted door, then let it drop.

I pushed off the counter and walked over to stand next to him, extending my own hand to sense the flow of energies settling into their new pattern. I took a deep breath, enjoying the absence of tainted magic choking the air. My heart-rate hadn't slowed noticeably.

"Until d—" I started to say, but I was interrupted by Marcone's lips on mine. 

It looked like we were skipping polite this time, too. Marcone dove into my mouth like he was planting a flag there. I bit his tongue and he growled, pulling me in close enough I could feel his dick twitch in his pants. I pulled back and bit his lip and then his ear.

The wall hit my back a fraction of a second before Marcone's lips found mine again. I clutched his shoulders, as though there was a chance in hell he was going anywhere, and the thought caused a flush of warmth to uncurl low inside me. 

We kissed fiercely, filthily, hungrily; but Marcone's hands at my hips were gentle, his thumbs barely brushing the skin beneath my tank top. I may have been grinding into his leg, but the high, needy sounds were obviously Marcone's. Which absolutely explains why he hitched my thigh up over his hip and started groping my ass. Totally.

I wrapped my other leg around Marcone's waist to give him better access, because I'm considerate like that. Stars, it felt good, though. I shook with the almost ticklish sensation of Marcone slowly, gently peeling away my sweat-soaked shirt to bare my skin. My limpet-like hold on his shoulders and the vacuum seal of our kiss precluded him doing more than pushing it up far enough to expose my bra.

I had some nice—slutty? nice—underwear, mostly because Inari and our mutual half-brother Thomas are bad influences, and Molly is a quick study. And none of the bras from before my pregnancy fit anymore, including all the Hawk-era stuff, which under the circumstances was maybe just as well. 

But I was not wearing the nice underwear right now. I was wearing a cheap, thin cotton bra that was as saturated as my shirt. At one point, it had been white, but now it had a definite, unsexy yellowish cast from all the sweating I'd done in it over the years. I really should have known better. Always wear your good undies when you go out: you never know when you're going to get in a car accident. Or fucked by a mafia boss. 

Marcone didn't even bother trying to get the bra off me, just pulled my breasts out of the cups with his warm, rough hands. Big hands, stars, yes. They could just keep doing—that—

I definitely did not make more embarrassing noises when Marcone ducked down and hitched me up and licked the nipple he'd been abusing. One of my hands slid up into his hair and held him in place when he bit down. You wouldn't think that would be sexy after breast-feeding, but apparently two years was long enough to get over it, and Marcone was very, very persuasive. He spent a lot of time nipping and scraping his teeth across sensitive skin and lavishing licking kisses everywhere.

My breathing was accompanied by thready, hitching moans. Marcone had re-established his grip on my ass, the friction of his dick through both our pants already close to setting me off, pressing the seam of my jeans not _quite_ where I needed it. I wound my arm more tightly around Marcone's neck, clutching him to me.

"You'd better have a condom," I growled.

Marcone twitched so violently I was afraid he'd come in his pants, but the only wetness between us continued to be mine. He breathed, in and out, in and out, bringing up goosebumps on spit-slick skin. 

"My wallet," Marcone said at last, and stars and stones was it hot to realise I could strip away all of that steely control and leave him so desperate he could barely form words. 

I took my right hand out of Marcone's hair and started fishing around in his pants. I didn't know why he seemed so fascinated: Marcone's ass was _way_ better than mine. I may have gotten a little, uh, distracted by it. Momentarily.

"My wallet is in my jacket, Harry," Marcone told me some minutes later, still talking into my breasts.

"Right," I gasped, not immediately relocating my hand. "I can't help but notice you could have pointed that out sooner, John."

That got me a real bite, one that went straight down to my aching cunt. I suppose that by now we should have been able to use one another's first names without it being a pissing contest, but who am I kidding? It was me and Marcone; that's not how we work. Besides, it's more fun this way.

Feeling up Marcone's chest was almost as nice, if a bit more challenging given that he'd skipped ahead to unzipping my jeans. I lost focus again about the same time Marcone's fingers found my clit, gripping the smooth-worn leather of the wallet still in his inside pocket. 

Somehow, we managed to get one of my boots off and one leg out of my pants without Marcone ever having to actually let me down or even really take his fingers out of me. I had only managed to get his fly undone.

I twisted my wrist around and squeezed, then, liking the result, slipped my hand in further to draw out Marcone's cock. Because Marcone's hands and mouth were still busy—I was so close, so so so close, and Marcone was a miserable goddamned tease—it fell to me to open the condom and roll it on. I spat the excess packaging away. I was a bit rusty, and doing this one-handed not to mention half-crazy was a challenge, but I managed.

Marcone's cock was nice and thick and long, and I liked the way it felt in my hand. I stroked him just for the feel of it, latex stretched over hot, resilient flesh. Marcone thrust helplessly, a moan caught low in his throat, his long fingers curling deep inside me.

"Hell's bells," I swore. "John, come on. Fuck, I need you, I—"

I broke off with an undignified sound I will not describe when Marcone took his fingers out. I was expecting him to push my underwear aside, or maybe engage us in more contortionism, or even do something radical like fuck me on the floor and not throw out his back. Instead, Marcone got his forearms under my thighs, took hold of my poor generic panties, and ripped them apart.

Hell's bells. I bit my fist and tried to remember what breathing felt like in the respite while Marcone resettled his grip, lining everything up. 

I might as well not have bothered. Marcone's cock went in and in and in. I beat his shoulders with my fist and swore loudly at him if he tried to stop. It was amazing. It didn't matter that I was exhausted and probably smelled like fear and sweat, or that I couldn't remember the last time I shaved my legs, or that this was so incredibly stupid a decision I couldn't even begin to find the words. When I had taken all of him in, I wrapped myself around him as tightly as I could and let him sink his teeth possessively into my shoulder.

Eventually, I loosened my death-grip, allowing Marcone to make more than just shallow thrusts. He was big and blunt and hard and rubbed up against all the right places inside of me while our hips worked in rhythm. It took me almost no time at all to come the first time, with Marcone rumbling _yes, Harry, yes, say it_ in my ear.

" _John_ ," I grated back, just as much of a challenge, as my inner muscles spasmed. I was overwhelmed by tight waves of pleasure tripping through me, the abused but still soft fabric of Marcone's suit, his body inside it, the places where we touched skin to skin, the smell of spices and magic in the air being subsumed in the smell of sex, the wet sounds as Marcone slid so slickly and easily in and out.

Marcone's zipper dug into my ass. His fingers dug into my ass so hard they were going to leave bruises. The zipper too, probably. He was really putting his back into it, not even biting now, his head bent just short of resting on my chest. I wished I could see his face, and then I realised I could. I unclamped my right arm from Marcone's straining, shifting shoulders, changing our angle slightly. My pentacle amulet rested just below my collarbones; when I touched it, it immediately burst into blazing blue-white light.

Marcone looked up at me, right into my eyes, just exactly like it should be. I held his gaze even though it was almost too close to focus. His breathing was fast and shallow, I felt rather than saw; he must have been close because he took a hand out from under me and started working my clit with his thumb. The muscles in his shoulders and other arm trembled with the strain.

My control was shot all to hell; the amulet's light flickered in rhythm with our bodies as they moved together towards a common goal. We were allies in this, whatever happened afterwards. Marcone and I held each other's eyes, and in those last few moments, what _this_ was changed. The blinding light I saw when I came again was probably just the amulet, not orgasm. I saw Marcone's face through it, after all, when he finally gave it up. It was worth watching.

We sort of slid to the floor afterwards. Eventually, Marcone got it together enough to skooch around and lean against the wall beside me, although this meant my bare ass was now in direct contact with the cold floor.

"Okay, I'm starting to forget how this goes on a bed," I said.

Somewhat arbitrarily, I kicked off my pants but put my boobs away. Marcone tied the condom off, but like a freak he then got up and started looking for a trash can. I shook my head. 

"Here," I said, making a vague motion. "Toss."

Somewhat bemused, Marcone did so. I raised my right hand.

"Fuego."

The gout of flame was maybe a bit bigger than it absolutely needed to be—I suck at evocation, which is why all the gadgets. Marcone looked enlightened. It's not wise, in the magical world, to leave bits of yourself lying around for people to use. Finding you is the least of what they can do with it. Not to mention plain old police forensics, because even if we got out of here before anyone who worked here showed up, they were going to notice the mess.

"Ah. Thank you."

My stomach growled. "I'm starving."

"You sound surprised." Marcone sounded amused, the rat bastard. "Well, if you bring the light, I'm sure I can manage something. We are in a kitchen, after all."

"Blow job if you find me a place to shower, too," I joked.

"Unfortunately, they're on the wrong side of your barrier. Perhaps another time?"

I shook my head. "You know, you could have opened whatever door that was instead."

"This was closer, and I was under the impression time was of the essence. Besides, I had no way of predicting this particular turn of events."

I tried and failed to summon up an objection or expression of discontent, especially since if Marcone had taken us someplace with a shower, we also likely wouldn't have been eating for several more hours. I'd survived both dirt and hunger before, and I could say from experience that I'd much rather be dirty and well-fed than the other way around.

"Not unless you're vastly more stupid than I thought you were."

"Why Harry, that was almost a compliment."

"Almost," I agreed cheerfully. Crap. I was going to have to put my pants back on after all. I sighed and reached for them.

Friendship is actually a nice Chinese restaurant. The food, believe it or not, bears some resemblance to what people eat in China—not my speed at all. Of course, Marcone wasn't an expert in Chinese cuisine himself; it was the fresh ingredients that were important. If you have good ingredients and some more basic kitchen sense than I do, chances are you're going to end up with something edible.

Marcone definitely had more basic kitchen sense than I do, as well as apparently being immune to the pull of the post-coital nap. I considered the virtues of the post-coital nap while I trailed Marcone around the kitchen, holding up my light while he rummaged for whatever arcane paraphernalia was needed for his purposes. Said virtues were manifold, but the food could not happen in the dark, so I'd just have to suck it up and deal.

Once Marcone was satisfied, I hopped up onto the counter, the chain of my brightly glowing amulet looped casually around my hand. Marcone seemed to be really appreciating the quality of the chef's knives, if the way he was going after those vegetables was any indication. I kicked my heels, trying to decide how much of a problem it was that I apparently found Marcone's knife work hot. On the one hand, it was kind of distracting. On the other, it cut way down on the intimidation factor.

"He slices, he dices, he makes Julienne fries," I intoned in the faux-hearty tones of an infomercial salesman.

Marcone gave me a flat, assessing look that went with the knives.

Okay, yeah, problem. I raised my eyebrows at Marcone and popped another glazed walnut into my mouth. He'd tried to foist freaking _caviar_ on me. And cognac. It was kind of nice, but I had a feeling I had better start re-asserting certain boundaries before things got out of hand. You know, soon. After he'd finished whatever he was doing with that duck and wine and cheese. 

And once he'd finished _that_. All I'd done was offer him some walnuts once he'd got everything chopped and into pans, but he'd evidently decided he was hungry for something else. I was still sticky and wet from the first round, my engorged tissues barely returning to normal. I guess Marcone was making up for missing out on that shower; I was having a hard time minding right at that moment. 

Marcone assiduously licked me clean, then proceeded to get me even wetter. I watched hypnotised until I couldn't take it anymore, the sight of Marcone on his knees with his head between my legs. My good hand was in his hair, either pulling or caressing. 

The third orgasm of the night left me in a puddle. I sprawled languidly on the counter, half-out of my jeans and too blissed to care. My eyes drifted shut. Maybe I'd go for that nap after all. I yawned, just to try it out.

"Hey, is something burning?" 

Marcone's head lifted from my knee. "Ah. That would be dinner." I heard him rise to his feet. "It doesn't look as though my distraction has caused any lasting damage."

"Woo-hoo." I twirled a finger in the air in celebration.

Marcone served up something with lots of calories: meat, cheese, noodles, and some kind of really tasty sauce, with lots of nuts on the side. All I was missing was a nice, cold beer. Well, you can't have everything.


	5. Chapter 5

I was just recovering from the food coma at dawn, when Marcone turned his cellphone on and made a call to his people. I poked around some more, locating what was probably the staff's private coffee machine and turning it on. 

There was a loud, rustling noise and the layers of salt walling off the doors fell all at once, with the rising of the sun. I extended my magical senses, but found nothing except some rapidly vanishing residue. It made sense: this bird sorcerer, whoever it was, didn't seem to be the type to stick around long once the action was over. I said as much to Marcone, who nodded, a calculating look in his eye.

Hendricks had evidently escaped the FBI, since he was behind the wheel of the SUV waiting for us by the side of the road. Marcone insisted on dropping me off first, like a well-brought-up boy. On the way, I noticed a half-dozen variously non-descript cars keeping pace with us; none of them was the white T-bird from yesterday.

Marcone did stop short of walking me to my door and kissing me good-night. He hadn't actually touched me since he had handed me into the car in his usual high-society fashion. Or kissed me since he finished cooking our midnight snack; just watched me like he always did.

I disabled my wards and unlocked my door, definitely not looking over my shoulder at Marcone. As soon as the door opened, Mister shoulder-blocked me and ran outside, per usual. I maintained my balance and closed the door behind me.

My apartment consists of the basement and sub-basement of a hundred-year-old boarding house. It isn't huge, just a living room, bedroom, and bathroom, with a kitchen-nook in one corner of the main room and a trap-door down to my lab. Very little had survived the zombie invasion last year, pretty much just my ice box—a real, old-fashioned one with actual ice—most of my wood-burning stove, and the wrought iron grate in front of my fireplace. And, for some odd reason, the gift popcorn tin by the door where I keep my staves, sword-cane, umbrella, and one of the Swords of the Cross. 

I buy most of my furniture second-hand anyway, so it wasn't too bad replacing it. But then Billy and Georgia's place got trashed during that whole fiasco with their wedding. Even though Georgia's parents are loaded, they still live down in what the Alphas all refer to as the student ghetto. And in the middle of June, when at least half the leases in the area expire, graduating students are so desperate to clear their apartments they dump a lot of non-junk furniture out back by the dumpsters, and the rest of it gets sold for a fraction of what it's worth. Since they were already raiding the back-alleys anyway, the Alphas decided my place needed a make-over. 

The furniture still isn't what you'd call matching, but it is comfortable. The couch is almost long enough for me to lie down on. I have a replacement coffee table and a couple armchairs with honest-to-god ottomans. What is this luxury? The Alphas had also wanted to get me a bigger bed, but I put my foot down and stopped the madness on the perfectly legitimate grounds that if my bed were any bigger, I wouldn't be able to open the bathroom door.

My collection of throw-rugs had gotten replaced quickly—stone floors are _cold_ in winter—and when Molly's dad Michael had re-hung my steel security door, he'd also bolted the new bookshelves to the wall so Maggie couldn't pull them over on top of herself. My vintage Star Wars poster made it through the attack only a little the worse for wear; it and a few old tapestries kept my walls from looking too bare, and some of the Scamp's finger-paint masterpieces pinned to them brightened the place up. There were two chests up against a clear space on the wall: a battered, hand-joined wooden one for Maggie's toys, and an army footlocker Thomas kept some things in, since he stayed over more nights than not. 

Or at least, he used to. Like I said before, I was a bit worried about Thomas. He'd been simultaneously more distant and more relaxed these past several months, and I was a little concerned about why. Thomas had wounds and struggles of his own. Periods where he'd wear himself out trying to find and keep work alternated with weeks where he'd almost defiantly do nothing but play with the Scamp and let Mister use him as a body-pillow. 

I wasn't sure which it was this time. He'd been watching the Scamp for me a lot lately, but as soon as I got home he was out the door. I never knew when he was out because he was feeding and when he was out because he was working; he kept a small apartment in a somewhat better neighbourhood for that sort of thing, rented with the mysterious-but-still-beggaring-mine contents of his bank account. Back when he got disinherited by the sex-vampire branch of the family, he'd told Lara he had 'a little' money put away, which taking into account we were noshing in a castle courtyard could have meant anything from a couple grand to half a million. 

I muttered a couple words of pseudo-Latin to light the lamps and candles around the room, all carefully raised out of toddler-reach. My couch was empty, but I'd been half-expecting that. I was pretty sure someone was home though, for two reasons. The first was my dog, Mouse—and when I say dog, I mean excessively hairy hippopotamus—who clambered to his feet from his spot in front of my bedroom door and lumbered over to greet me. 

The second was the fact the apartment was, how can I put this? a disaster area. Half the couch cushions were strewn across the floor, along with what looked like all of Maggie's toys. The sink was full of dishes and there were empty take-out cartons all over the coffee table. Even without the fancy, man-sized suede boots in front of the cold fireplace, the mess had Thomas written all over it. He had the sort of casual inability to pick up after himself that I suspect only comes from always having had a staff to do it for you. Molly, on the other hand, had been so well-conditioned by her mother and years of herding her own younger siblings I don't think it even registered on a conscious level when she cleared the wreckage. So much for teenage rebellion.

I actually did have a staff, of a sort. Back when I'd done that favour for the new Summer Knight and Summer Lady, they'd hooked me up with a faerie housekeeping service. They do great work—my landlord paid for a chimney sweep to come in once a year, since I actually use the fireplace, and he was always impressed by how clean the chimney was and the way I kept the ashes raked—but they only come when no one's home. 

I scratched Mouse's ears—something I could do without bending over—and he gave me a knowing look. "Oh, shut up," I told him.

I went to check his bowl anyway, making sure both his and Mister's were topped up with food and water, and nearly twisting my ankle twice on the way. There was enough residue to tell Thomas had fed them last night, but my pets are as oversized as I am, and they take some feeding. Mister was probably out hunting down supplementary lapdogs or something. Mouse's tongue lolled out in doggy laughter at the transparency of my tactics, and then he buried his face in the kibble.

"Harry?"

My brother shuffled out of the bedroom, bare-chested and scratching sleepily at his attractively mussed hair. His abs rippled. Usually, I'd be giving him the stink-eye and thinking dark thoughts about the unfairness of genetics, but my mind was a little bit elsewhere.

"Oh, I'm sorry; were you still sleeping?" I asked innocently.

Thomas yawned. "What happened to your face?"

"Work," I started to say, but then Thomas got his eyes open again. "What happened to your neck?" he said overtop of me. "And your— _Harry_. It's about time."

I slapped my hand over the side of my neck. That was it; Marcone was going to die. "No—I—what—no—go back to sleep," I told him. 

"No, no, I'm up now. Would you like some coffee?"

"I am going to take a shower," I said firmly. _A long, cold shower_ , I added mentally. "Then I'm going back to work. That's how it's going to be."

"Whatever you say, Harry," Thomas agreed. He was wearing almost exactly the same expression as Mouse had been. 

I get no respect.

The Scamp, bless her, was still sleeping like a log. The Alphas must have really tuckered her out. I smiled and watched her face, so deceptively angelic, but didn't smooth down her dark hair in case I woke her up.

I went into the bathroom and finally had my shower. The cold water didn't help the muscles I'd strained and over-exerted last night (and not just the ones you're thinking of), but it did help me to not think about it. So I'd had sex with Marcone. I'd deal with it later; right now I had more important things to think about.

I got dressed and went back out, where Thomas had gotten Maggie up, made a pot of coffee, and was cooking eggs and bacon. The cushions were back on the sofas. Maggie was in her high chair, happily abusing Cheerios.

"Morning, Scamp," I greeted her.

"Mouse say wan' bacon!" Maggie underscored her argument by pointing her spoon at Thomas; milk and soggy oat rings spun off with wild abandon. 

"No kidding." Mouse was more or less sitting on Thomas' feet. He turned to give the Scamp an unashamed grin. She is totally his favourite.

"Do you have time for breakfast?" Thomas asked.

"Nothing happened," I told him.

Thomas turned around and pressed his index finger to my forehead, then wiggled its undamaged tip in my face to make his point. I batted it away. 

"You're not going to get me to talk about it."

"Here," he said, sliding a plate of eggs, bacon, and buttered toast over next to my R2D2 mug on the minuscule counter wedged into my kitchen nook. I took a sip. He'd already added sugar.

"I'm serious. And since when do we even have bacon?"

Thomas shrugged, filching back a piece and popping it into his mouth. Mouse hit him with the sad eyes. Thomas dropped him a strip of raw, fatty pig meat. Soft touch. "I didn't buy it."

Must have been the faeries, then. I guess it balanced out the time they'd filled the cupboards with nothing but Fruit Loops. 

I grunted and started bulldozing through the food. The other thing about having brownies do your housework was that you couldn't tell anybody or they'd go away. Thomas must have either thought I was pretty absent-minded or a lot more wizardly than I actually was.

As soon as I finished eating, I fled to my lab. My lab is not the neatest or most child-proof place, and if I could, I'd keep Maggie out of it entirely. Having Thomas around helped a lot, and Inari when she came over to hang out with her brother and do her reading because life was just better when she and Molly were on the same block. Young love: it was enough to give me diabetes. But Molly wouldn't learn about wizardry by watching the Scamp, and even though by mutual agreement we never talked about it, Thomas did occasionally have a life. So sometimes the only option was to take Maggie down to the lab with me.

The other thing about my lab is that it isn't big. There are tables along three of the walls and a fourth that sits between them—currently in the process of being slowly taken over by a scale model of Chicago—leaving barely enough room for me in between. I'd had to cram Molly's desk in nearer to my copper summoning circle than I'd like because there just wasn't anyplace else for it; thankfully, Molly is much neater than I am and keeps the circle clear. 

I'd moved some stuff around, put down some padding under the table on the end-wall and screened it off when Maggie was younger to make sort of a play-pen, and later I expanded the enclosure to make a bit of a run under one of the tables lining the walls. It was far from a perfect solution. I doubted CPS would have agreed that it was responsible parenting to have my kid spend any time at all in the same room with depleted uranium dust and human remains. Of course, if it came to that, I could think of some other government organisations who wouldn't have been happy about those things either.

The bulk of my storage had always been up on wire shelves above my worktables anyway. The depleted uranium was higher up now, but the human remains were on the same wooden shelf where they'd always been, bracketed by two candlesticks so wax-encrusted they'd disappeared from view years ago and sharing space with some trashy paperbacks, a Victoria's secret catalogue, and a bonsai Sequoia. 

"Hey, Bob," I called to the bleached human skull on the shelf. "Wake up."

"Well, someone's cheerful this morning," Bob grumbled, twin pinpricks of orange flame flickering to life deep within the skull's eye-sockets. They locked onto me and brightened. "Someone's _very_ cheerful this morning."

Hells bells, I was going to have to have this conversation while looking at Marcone's bonsai. I knew I should have ignored Bob's whining and burned it. "Stop right there. We've got work to do."

"I'll say." Bob somehow managed to give the impression of leering. "Did you finally break down and have a lesbian threesome? Without inviting me to watch? Ooh, no, I recognise that aura now! Getting in bed with the mob, huh? I've gotta say, you really made him work for it. What finally made you—"

" _Bob_ —" I grated. "Wait, you can tell who I, you know, just by looking at me?"

"Boss, you're a grown woman with a child. You should be able to say the word."

I demonstrated my ability to articulate a healthy variety of forms of the word in question. I then implied my willingness to illustrate them upon his skull with a wide range of hand tools, for example the claw hammer I had just picked up.

"See, I knew you could do it. But since you ask so nicely—you two swapped a big ol' chunk of energy during the act. It's like a big sign saying 'Gentleman Johnny Was Here'."

"Energy?"

"Yeah, you know. Life force, your soul, your intangible bits. It happens every time you get some. The energy you exchanged with Hawk is what keeps you safe from the White Court. Er, kept, now, I guess."

"I gave _Marcone_ part of my _soul_?" I choked. "Wait, I've got essence of criminal slimebag all over me? I think I need another shower."

"Well, it doesn't look like you minded having him all over you last night." 

I flexed my grip on the hammer.

"But you didn't come down here to give me a play-by-play, although if you want to, I'm totally interested—um, what can I help you with, Harry?" Bob asked nervously.

"A bunch of kids have gone missing, one a day for the past six days." 

I explained the situation for Bob, with as many of the details as I could remember, from the disappearances at the Taste to the way Trevor Abbascia's trail had vanished in mid-air over the lake and the Alfred Hitchcock Presents re-run that had followed. He looked over Murphy's files, which Georgia had dropped off last night, and examined the vestiges of the sorcerer's magic still hovering about me.

"And whose favourite Harry Potter is _Chamber of Secrets_ anyway?" I complained. " _Prisoner of Azkaban_ , now—Lupin nailed the chocolate thing, and the Dementors are kind of like White Court Vampires, only without all the hair-twirling. Plus the way they thwart the ax-happy bad guys."

"Yeah, but the White Council would have executed Hermione, her boy-toys, and that old lech Dumbledore for breaking the Sixth Law into itty-bitty pieces," Bob pointed out. Dumbledore is Bob's hero, for reasons I have unfortunately had explained to me. He was crushed last year when [spoilers redacted].

"Animagus!" I exclaimed, snapping my fingers.

"Huh?"

"That's it! That's why the spell seemed familiar. I should have seen it sooner; I was hanging around with Georgia all afternoon. The Sorcerer's turning them into birds."

"Ye-ah," Bob said slowly. "Probably himself, too; that would explain how he was following you last night, and how he's avoided being seen. Pretty slick."

My stomach turned over. "It accounts for the black magic, too." 

Transmogrification, changing someone else's form, is a violation of the second law of magic. When you transform someone into an animal, it destroys their mind. It's different when you do it to yourself, like what Billy, Georgia, and the Alphas do. They do all right now, but when they first started out, someone else had to teach them how to be wolves. But if it gets done to you, I guess the instincts come with the shape and overpower your mind. Or something. I'd had an experience a while back with something halfway in between, people who were using someone else's power to make the change. The animal ended up taking over even when they were in human form. I'd gotten a taste of what it was like, to see the world without all the mortal baggage of morals or conscience, nothing but myself and the night and the hunt, thrumming through my heightened senses, my blood.

But it wasn't just that; I'd enjoyed the power. It had been as intoxicating as any other dark magic I've ever been tempted by. Something deep inside of me had liked it. Had wanted to assert my dominance over those weaker than myself. To kill.

I shuddered at the memory. "Why? I mean, what's the point? Most of the families aren't very wealthy or important. There haven't been any ransom demands or sadistic messages or even a corpse. It seems like a lot of trouble to go through just for human sacrifices. I mean, I hate to say it, but there have got to be easier ways."

"Well, he could be making a Semurgh," Bob offered.

"A what now?"

"It's a wyldfae, although some side with Winter or Summer. Sort of a colonial organism."

I frowned. "Like those weird jellyfish?"

"Yeah, only sentient. A bunch of people turn into birds, and then the birds turn into the Semurgh. I won't say the legends get it wrong, but they're so rare the stories got based off maybe one or two individuals and they've gotten way distorted over the years. Semurghs don't really have genders, for one thing—I mean, asexual reproduction, obviously. Way less fun. I wouldn't count on one being well-disposed towards mortals, either."

"Legends? I've never heard of these things," I objected.

"That's because you're seriously behind on your Eastern mythology. Mantiq-ut-Tayr, man. But sure you have; you know that nursery rhyme, Sing a Song of Sixpence?"

"Sure," I said.

"Well, that's about the Semurgh. In the original version, there were four and twenty naughty boys. They get baked in a pie and when someone cuts it open, there are birds inside. The metaphor's a little awkward, I'll grant you, but you get the idea."

"Stars."

"That was one of Winter's. I mean, eating bread and honey? The maid getting her nose pecked off? Sidhe all over the place."

"Sounds like Mab to me," I agreed. "Okay; how many kids do they need?"

"Three," Bob said promptly. "But since your sorcerer's already got six, the next likely number is seven—you know, Semargl, seven heads. The Persians translated it as si morgh, thirty birds. The more you use, the bigger and more powerful the Semurgh will be."

"Great," I said drily. "What else can you tell me about it?"

"Oh, well." Bob _hmm_ ed. "It doesn't actually look like a bird once it's all put together. More like a winged dog. And big. Size of a small elephant, maybe."

"Any powers or anything I should watch out for? Can it do magic?"

"Aside from it being twenty times your size and airborne? There are some associations with crops, healing, fire, the end of the world—the usual."

I choked. "The end of the world, Bob?"

Somehow, Bob conveyed the impression of shrugging. "Mostly poetical clap-trap. Primitive cultures were all hellhound-this and doomsday-hound that. Mostly it just meant they had big teeth. But if it starts heading for Ursa Minor, I'd get out of there."

Well, nursery rhymes aside, this one wasn't sounding very wintery. Good. Mixing it up with faeries was never fun, but I'd managed to attract just a little too much of Mab's attention over the years, and that was never healthy. Not that I hadn't pissed off her counterpart, Titania, too; but I was less likely to draw personal attention from Titania than Mab. And I'd definitely rather deal with Lily than Maeve.

"That reminds me," I said. "I've been asked by the White Council to find out why the Faeries haven't stepped up and sent the Red Court crying for their mommies in retaliation for that stunt they pulled last year. Unofficially, of course. Think it's related?"

"How should I know? But it's nowhere near the same scale. Probably just some wyldfae stirring up trouble."

"Yeah. Probably. Except whoever's doing it...feels mortal. And..." I fished out the Gatekeeper's note. "As if this case weren't already creepy enough, Eb handed me this note this—yesterday morning. From the Gatekeeper."

Bob shivered. 

"Look up," I continued. "I mean, is that supposed to tell me something? _Look up_. He's crossed the line from cryptic to completely unhelpful, if you ask me."

"More like he crossed the line from future to present," Bob said.

"As in time travel?"

"Ehh." Bob rocked from side to side a few times. "There are ways of getting information from the future without actually _going_ there."

"Okay, so why be so vague? If whatever he found out is important enough for him to send me a message about it, why all the pussyfooting around?"

Bob sighed. "Because you can't just go around changing the past willy-nilly."

"Yeah. Because it's illegal."

"Did no one honestly ever teach you this stuff?" Bob asked with a degree of incredulity I found a little insulting. "It's a wonder you haven't blown yourself up, Harry."

"Stick to the point," I growled. My afterglow had completely evaporated.

"Oo-kay: paradoxes. Let's say he hears you had wild kinky sex."

" _Bob_ ," I warned him.

"Just as a random example. So, he hears about this wild monkey sex you're going to have and he comes back and tells you about it. And, you being you, instead of shaving your legs and putting your face on, you spend the night down here trying to figure out better ways to map Undertown and eventually implode under the pressure of sublimated sexual frustration."

"Get to the point, Bob."

"Well, if you don't have sex, how can he come back and tell you about it?"

"Huh."

"See? Paradox. The backlash could scramble his brains like an egg, not to mention creating all sorts of temporal anomalies. Theoretically, all of reality could come crashing down."

"And all because I didn't get laid."

"Hey, you're the one who keeps charging headlong into the apocalypse, boss."

"I do not," I objected. "It's not my fault everybody and his brother has to bring his evil schemes to Chicago."

"Well, maybe not entirely."

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Let's just get back to the point. You can't change the past without blowing up reality, or at least yourself. Hence the Council making it illegal, I guess."

"Yeah, but you can," Bob corrected me. "You've just got to be subtler. In our completely random example, he could tell you not to go out tonight. So you stay in, and instead of riding Johnny-boy until the wheels fall off, you have a lesbian threesome with the cookie and her sugar-momma and I get to watch."

"Bob!"

"You let me see _you_ naked," Bob pouted.

"I was being chased by a demon, Bob. It wasn't intentional."

"Lots of fun, though. You've got really great—"

"Remember when I commanded you to never speak of it again?" 

Bob heaved a sigh so heavy it rocked his skull. " _Fine_."

I rubbed at my eyes with the heel of my hand. "Okay, so basically the Gatekeeper is trying to use me to affect something else. And if he told me anything more, I might change the wrong thing and turn space-time into Humpty-Dumpty."

"I mean, he could just be messing with you. But this smells temporal to me."

"Yeah, and it's not like the last time someone told me to watch out overhead it was good news."

"Oh, I don't know. I mean, you survived," Bob pointed out.

"What's the point?" I groused.

"Of what?"

"Of any of it. Of telling me to look up. Of making a Semurgh. I mean, will it owe Bird Sorcerer something for, er, creating it, or what?"

"Hey, that's actually a pretty good question. I'm impressed, boss," Bob told me. "Semurghs are sort of like phoenixes. King-maker and -breaker types, when they notice you apes at all. It's much more likely one's collecting on a favour than it is some sorcerer's starting a new cottage industry."

"Pretty hefty favour." A thought occurred to me. "Hey, so assuming I manage to stop the sorcerer today, is there a way to change the kids back? Or, like, de-Semurghify them?" I threaded my fingers together and then yanked them apart illustratively. 

Bob and I spent some time discussing contingencies. Hopefully, I'd get the sorcerer before he could finish fusing them or whatever; but if not, I wanted to be prepared. Nabbing the sorcerer was going to be no mean trick.

I grabbed a few things and headed back upstairs. I still had about an hour before my meeting with Fix, so I called Georgia and asked her if she'd give me a ride over to the impound lot. I hung up and stared helplessly after the Scamp, who was busy turning the apartment back into Ground Zero.

"What did you do to your car this time?" Thomas asked.

I ran a hand through my hair, noting while I did so it was dry enough to comb again and braid. "Left it parked in the middle of LSD. Cops didn't like that, for some reason."

"Here, let me." Thomas grabbed my brush off a shelf and sorted through the kitchen drawer for a rubber band. What can I say? I'm classy like that.

"Do you seriously know what you're doing back there, or is this going to turn into revenge for not dishing to you about my love-life?" I asked as Thomas put a knee on the couch behind me.

"I do have other sisters, Harry."

I tried to picture Thomas braiding Lara's hair. Urk. "Then why haven't you—right. Never mind. Just, no, y'know. All right?"

"Do you want me to do this, or do you want to walk around for the rest of the day with bird crap in your hair?"

"Ew. Fine."

"Fine. Hold still."

Thomas worked the brush through my hair for a while, kneeling behind me. I was enough taller than him that if he sat down he wouldn't be able to see the top of my head. What fell between us wasn't precisely a tense silence, since the Scamp was bouncing from wall to wall like the ball in Pong. But there was a...weight of something between us.

Thomas set the brush down and started French braiding my hair. "I've been feeding again. You should know."

I tried to turn around and look at him, but my hair pulled and he made a noise of protest. 

"I'll understand if you don't want me around anymore."

I rolled my eyes. "Oh, please. You're such a drama queen. Is this why you've been so squirrelly since—what?"

"Last Halloween," Thomas admitted grudgingly.

"Oh, sure. I was fighting necromancers and you were getting jiggy with it." The story of my life. "Why is it whenever _my_ car breaks down, I never get rescued by a professional gymnast or the Bahamian national swim team?"

"It wasn't a woman. It was the hunt. I went with them."

I stilled. 

"I'm not proud of it. I—" Thomas cut himself short. "Anyway, I left you guys in the lurch last time. The reasons don't matter. So I've been trying to stick close, make sure I've got your backs if you need it."

"Is that why you do everything short of run screaming out of any room I'm in?" A thought occurred to me. "You haven't been, like, following me around, have you?"

"...No?"

Because that would be too easy. "Then it's probably the usual stalker in my life. Don't worry about it."

"Hm," Thomas did not quite agree. Pause. "I've got a job, actually."

"Well that's, uh, good."

That was news. Usually, I head a lot about Thomas' occasional forays into the working-class world. I don't know if it was that he'd been hungry or the sex-vampire thing was just something he couldn't turn off, but each and every single job had ended with a scene from a soft-core porno and Thomas getting canned. After which he sulked around the apartment and I got to hear about it. Ad nauseum. Oversharing, thy name is Raith. Anybody surprised?

At this point, it would have been natural for me to have certain suspicions about the nature of my brother's new 'job'. I mean, there are a couple pretty easy ways for an incubus to get money, and neither scores very high on the morality meter. I didn't think Thomas was that desperate for money. Of course, he could be that desperate for the other thing.

I cleared my throat. "Anything else to add while we're playing True Confessions?"

Thomas snorted. "Wait, let me go get my diary."

"Jerk."

"Witch."

Thomas finished whatever he'd been doing to my hair. I patted it. He'd disappeared the dangling end somewhere so nobody could grab hold of it. "Gee, maybe next time I should get you to do my nails, too." 

"While we gossip about our sex lives?" Thomas suggested.

"Stars, no. Venticetta," I said, calling a gentle wind to gather Maggie into my lap as she ran past. She squealed in delight.

There was a rap on the door.

"That'll be Georgia. Scamp, you keep the boys from wrecking the place. Love you." I bent to smack a noisy kiss on her head, then reluctantly let her wriggle away. 

"Mommy go kill monsas!" Maggie said proudly.

Hell's bells, I can't believe they let me have a kid.

"I'm going to find out eventually, you know," Thomas told me.

I shrugged into my duster. My apartment stays cool, even in the summer—one advantage of having a basement apartment. But the leather was going to suck ferociously as soon as I stepped outside.

"No, you're not. Because I am not going to talk about it, and it's not going to happen again." I looked down. "That had better mean you haven't had your walk yet this morning."

Mouse stared back up at me with calm certainty. It was the same expression he'd used to wheedle bacon out of Thomas earlier. 

"Absolutely not. I—"

Mouse already had his leash in his mouth. He wagged his tail.

"—hate you all."

Mouse wagged harder.


	6. Chapter 6

Georgia took a startled step back when I jerked the door open and stalked past her, towards the SUV looming in my apartment building's little gravel parking lot. Once inside, she hesitated before turning the key, eyeing me and my mood.

I don't spend a lot of time looking in mirrors—too many things might be looking back—but I didn't need one to know I was a little the worse for wear. A shower had served to get rid of most of the bird crap in my hair despite what Thomas said; but there were scratches all over my arms and neck, and going by the stinging, my back as well—although that might have been friction burn, too. There were finger-shaped bruises on my ass and upper thighs, as predicted, and bite marks peppered across my chest that my tank top wouldn't have concealed. The one on my neck, the only one still visible, was almost big enough to pass off as blunt force trauma. I suppose I could have tried to cover it up, slap a bandage over it or something since any makeup I owned was minimal and over four years old, but the coat was going to be hot enough.

"Busy night," Georgia said at last.

"Is there any chance we can stick to business?" I asked plaintively. 

Georgia kept looking at me for a long moment, then made a frustrated sound. "You are so lucky I'm not Will." 

I must have sounded more pathetic than I thought. Georgia shifted into gear and pulled out. 

"Were you followed last night?"

"No. Were you? Where did you go?"

"Short version, the sorcerer's a shapeshifter with fierce copyright infringement issues."

"One more time?"

"All the birds," I explained.

"O-okay. Any line on the kids?"

"More birds," I said. "He's turning them into birds and sending them across into the Nevernever."

"Why?"

"Not sure, possibly weird faerie stuff."

Georgia's expression grew serious. "Do you need backup?"

"You don't have to if you don't want to," I told her. "Last time I dragged you guys into weird faerie stuff, it came back to bite you in the ass in a big way."

"I'm aware," Georgia said, a little primly. "I'll ask everybody, but I can already tell you what they're going to say. Want me to follow you to the Taste?"

"No, I've got another stop to make. If you guys are in, meet me outside the north entrance in an hour. Bring a couple boxes of pizza."

"Pizza?" Georgia asked.

"Pizza," I repeated.  
__ __ __

At the impound lot, I handed over a bunch of money and got my keys back. Then Mouse, the Beetle, and I sallied intrepidly forth to do valiant diplomacy. Accorded Neutral Territory—otherwise known as McAnally's Pub—wasn't open this early, so I found myself in another of Chicago's seemingly-endless parks. Secretly, I was thankful, being a little sore in the seat area this morning. 

Chicago is really green for a city, and the fact that it's burned down and been rebuilt with wider streets gives it an odd feeling of openness, even in the heart of downtown. Standing where I was, with my back to the street, I could almost imagine I was out in the country. 

When the Summer Knight showed up, he was accompanied by the Summer Lady. Surprise Faerie Queens, even nominally friendly ones, were still a shock to the system. I mean, there were literally flowers springing up where'er she trod. 

We talked. Imagine my complete and total lack of surprise when I found out the Faeries were playing power-games. Again. Did they just have nothing better to do with their time? 

And then, because I was apparently a masochist, I had Lily conjure up Maeve. Who, besides seconding Lily's frankly terrifying opinion that Mab was going off her rocker, insisted on commenting on my sex life. Again. Stars and stones, I could take a hint. I had learned my lesson, I really had: sex was just not worth the aggravation. I had reproduced; my biological clock could go suck it. It was all celibacy from here on out. 

I was glad I hadn't brought Georgia along, at least. Maeve was the one who sent Jenny Greenteeth to kidnap Billy and mess up her wedding, and let me tell you: marrying one of the fair folk is not all beer and roses, and it takes a hell of a lot more than a good lawyer to get you out of it. And that's assuming you survive your wedding night.

I had at least succeeded in giving myself something bigger to worry about than recent developments in my love-life. Speaking of apocalypses. Although I supposed that was one way to handle global warming; maybe I should buy stock in Under Armor and Land's End. I thought I caught a glimpse of my tail again, but I shook him—less by actually trying than just in the natural process of looking for parking in the Loop. You can usually find something even just a few blocks off the main drags, but you might have to look for a while. Especially on a day like today. 

I eventually found a spot on Wabash, right next to one of the electronic parking meters. All I was trying to do was get the goddamned thing to take my cash instead of demanding a credit card when all of a sudden the mechanism started making these grinding sounds sort of like dial-up internet looking for a connexion and the screen flickered into a block of purple dots and stayed that way.

"My, how convenient," Marcone said.

I jumped. "Stars and stones, Marcone. Wear a bell or something."

"I didn't mean to startle you."

Where went Marcone, there also went Cujo, although Cujo was paying more attention to the other dog on the block. I watched them for a second to see if they'd start growling and circling, but Mouse has better manners than that.

Marcone was impeccable as always, except for a nasty bruise on one cheekbone. I firmly squelched a stab of guilt: at least Marcone's was in a non-compromising location. I saw his eyes flick down to my hickey and the not-quite-high-enough neckline of the tee-shirt I was wearing. 

"Good morning, Harry," Marcone said, zeroing back in on my eyes.

"Good morning, _John_ ," I said pointedly, not missing the flash of...satisfaction? that got me in reply. So Marcone liked it when I pushed him back. Well, gee, folks.

I brushed past Marcone and yanked open the Beetle's hood to get into the front storage compartment. Mouse, the traitor, walked over to Marcone, sniffed him for a minute, and allowed the biggest crook in the state to scratch his ears. Cujo looked like it was only the fact we were standing on a crowded public street that was keeping his hand away from the gun I knew he had to be wearing under his suit. Both of them, probably, or why bother with the formalwear in this weather? 

"Some judge of character you are," I grumbled.

Mouse panted a grin at me. I huffed an exasperated sigh and tried to ignore Marcone looking over my shoulder as I grabbed my portable thaumaturgy kit. The braid Thomas had done for me was practical: hair is a really convenient, or inconvenient, handle in a fight. But I felt oddly vulnerable with my bent neck exposed and Marcone behind me, way more conscious of his body than I wanted to be. 

I lifted my Warden's cloak, the blood from yesterday's execution dried to a nauseating red-brown splash on the grey wool, to make sure my .44 was still there—something I hadn't wanted to do, you know, actually _in_ the impound lot. It was; I left it there, dropping the stained cloak over it again. Marcone and Hendricks might have concealed-carry permits or just be that convinced they were untouchable, but I didn't, and the FBI were likely to be all over the place today, too. I had other weapons law enforcement wouldn't think to confiscate, and a gun is a crappy one to take into a crowd in any case.

"I see what the officer was talking about," Marcone said. 

I slammed the hood closed, which would have been more effective if I hadn't had to keep holding it down so I could twist the piece of hanger wire that kept it shut. "Stars, I should have offed you and taken the parking immunity when Murphy offered it to me," I snapped irritably.

One of Marcone's eyebrows lifted microscopically. "Ah, missed opportunities."

I could feel my ears burning. Unless I was lucky and it was the heatstroke. A train rattled deafeningly by on the El tracks overhead, and I started walking.

Marcone fell into step beside me. "Can I help you carry that?"

I had the tackle box with my right hand and my staff and Mouse's leash—I don't know, I think he just likes to keep track of me—with my left. 

I said, "No."

"Were you able to discern anything further from what we saw last night?" Marcone asked. Apparently harassing-Harry time was over for now and we were back to business.

 _You mean other than that no one in my life has any respect for privacy?_ I narrowly avoided saying. "Some. Plan's still the same, wait for the bad guy to show up again and bag him."

Security was a couple of cops I knew, and apparently Izabylle Washington had told them to expect me, so I didn't have much trouble getting in before-hours. I managed to shake Marcone off long enough to collect the sample without freaking the poor girl the hell out. Izabylle was putting up a good front, but her eyes were red.

She'd managed to get hair, lots of tiny black curls I eventually figured out must have come off an electronic clipper. I thanked her, waiting until I was out of sight to kneel down and draw a circle on an out-of-the-way patch of asphalt. As I'd feared, my tracking spell got no traction. 

In order to find something, I used magic to form a link between a part of an object and the object itself. Thaumaturgy. But you can't form the link if part of the equation isn't there. If it's, for example, currently in the Nevernever. There was a good chance that if I stepped across to the Nevernever right now and repeated the same spell, it would work like a charm; and I'd do it that way if I had to. There were a couple of problems with that plan, too, though, so it was the backup.

"Well?" Marcone asked. He'd found me again. What were the odds?

"Wasn't expecting anything, but it never hurts to double-check." I stuffed the baggie in a pocket and picked the tackle box up again. "Well, time to go inspect the troops."  
__ __ __

The Alphas were waiting for me, a dozen or so young people in their mid-twenties wearing wife-beaters, board shorts, and those short knit dresses with elastic in the hems that everybody was wearing now. I wasn't sure about it as a fashion statement, but since the Alpha girls wouldn't be wearing anything underneath, it was probably just as well. Thankfully they were all in good enough shape to pull it off. I have to admit, the butterfly nets did look a little odd, though.

I was pretty sure that at least Billy and Georgia recognised Marcone trailing after me, but I zeroed in on the most important thing. "Greg! Mitchell! Unhand that pizza!"

College kids, I swear. 

Looking at least as puzzled as they were guilty, the boys stopped fishing around in the top box, wiping their greasy fingers on their shorts. I dumped my wizardly encumbrances with Georgia and Billy, told Mouse to stay, and appropriated the three large pizzas, then turned around and shoved them at Marcone.

"Here, these should be safe with you, Melanie." I carefully extricated one piece, then looked around. "Right. Now I need someplace private."

Marcone was doing that thing where his eyebrow almost twitched again. Oh, come on. This was hardly the strangest thing he'd seen me do in the last twenty-four hours. I trotted over to a stand of trees big enough to provide some shelter from prying eyes. Faeries can be kind of shy.

The usual procedure, when you want to call up one of the Little Folk, is to lay out a circle and bait it with some bread and milk or honey laced with a tiny bit of your blood. Then, when you call the faerie's name and it shows up and consumes the blood along with the food, the circle springs up, trapping it. You can then negotiate its release in return for information or whatever.

I kept the equipment necessary for this type of summoning in one of my coat pockets, but I hesitated to take it out. My relationship with Chicago's Little Folk had evolved during the time I'd spent here. And—I wasn't just going to be asking them for information this time; they could get hurt. That wasn't the sort of thing I wanted to force them into, even a little bit.

So. I said before that the traditional bait for lesser fae is bread and milk and honey. It's not a gigantic leap then to understand why they're also nuts for pizza, especially the way they make it here, which has cheese like other pizzas have crust. Chicago-style pizza is a brick of bread and cheese with the toppings sinking into it, covered by chunky tomato sauce and sometimes another layer of crust. It is one of man's greatest creations and a light in these dark times.

I put my back to a tree, facing away from the street, and held my hand out flat with the slice of pizza oozing oil and cheese and sauce all over it. Then I spoke a Name.

Names are another bit of thaumaturgy. Every sentient creature, mortal or not, has a name which is as much a part of who they are as their blood or toenail clippings. If you say it just right, you open the same sort of link. You can control them, compel them. Call them.

I spoke the Name, but I didn't do anything with it. I just wanted to get in touch. So I stood there, repeating it softly until Toot arrived.

It didn't take him very long, much less time than it did when I was trying to lure him sneakily. He came rocketing down out of the sky like a blue-white bowling ball aimed at my head.

Toot was maybe half again as big as he'd been the last time I saw him, a few years ago. Otherwise he was the same, from the purple hair and recycling centre battle gear to his ernest but slightly cock-eyed ferocity. He's the leader of a small band of local Wee Folk, which may have something to do with him being the one I originally struck up the pizza-deal with, and my weekly offerings have earned me a special place in their tiny, attention-deficit hearts.

I explained to Toot-toot what I wanted. A few minutes later, Mouse and I returned to where Marcone and the Alphas were waiting minus one slice of pizza. 

The Alphas, for all there were more than a few scars peeking out from their summery attire, still possessed the idealism of youth. It had occurred to me as I was walking into the trees that leaving them alone with Marcone might not have been my brightest idea ever, but I'd figured none of them would be stupid enough to start anything right out in the open. They weren't me, after all.

The scene I interrupted looked tense, but hadn't actually erupted into violence. The Alphas were massed behind Georgia and Billy, their posture not openly hostile but still clearly _pack_. They probably didn't even know they were doing it. Billy, for once, seemed to be deferring to Georgia. Not that he made a habit of steamrolling over her or anything, but Billy was nothing if not confrontational, and you usually had to sit on him for a while before he got over it.

Marcone had apparently handed the pizza off to Hendricks; figured. If he was at all worried about the prospect of facing down a dozen werewolves all by his lonesome, he didn't let on. I could practically see the gears turning behind his eyes as he analysed the Alphas' group dynamic.

"Okay, kids, follow me," I said brightly, busting up the uncomfortable silence.

"What _is_ that you've gotten all over yourself?" Marcone asked.

"Pixie dust." I shrugged. "Cujo, bring the pizza."

I supervised the laying out of the pizza, then had everyone step back to the edge of the trees. I was just finishing filling everyone in on their parts in my scheme when several dozen globes of vari-hued light descended from every direction at once, homing in on their target.

"Jesus Christ," Hendricks swore, automatically reaching for his gun and moving to put Marcone behind him. I thought I saw a muscle jump in Marcone's jaw as he put out a hand to still Cujo. I could sympathise. Even expecting it, I had to suppress a flinch, especially after last night. 

Marcone's eyes were alight with fascination. It was so akin to the Alphas' exclamations of _holy shit!_ and _seriously?_ that I had to bite my lip to keep a proper expression of wizardly dignity on my face. Shut up, I can put on a show when I have to.

"It's like watching a school of piranha strip a carcass." 

Toot zipped over to me, still munching on a chunk of pizza. The slice I'd given him earlier had been about twice his mass; I wouldn't have believed it was possible for him to eat the whole thing if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. I'd have to tell Murphy about this the next time she complained about _my_ metabolism.

"Toot."

"My lady!" Toot snapped me a salute. With the wrong hand, but, well, pizza. 

"At ease, soldier," I told him gravely.

"The Za-Lady's troops have assembled," Toot reported.

"More like disassembled," one of the Alphas said in an awed voice.

"Excellent work, Toot," I complimented him. "These are the humans. Once you have the bird, find one of them and they'll take it in charge."

Toot looked at me like I was being slow. "But Harry, those aren't humans, they're wolves."

I blinked. Even I sometimes forget how much the Little Folk see. They're everywhere and pretty damn near invisible when they don't want to be seen. And all faeries, even the lesser fae, routinely see much more of magic than even wizards, if we're not specifically looking.

"Right you are. Bring news of the bird to the nearest wolf-human, then, once it's captured, and be careful not to do it harm. Everything else comes straight to me."

"Yes, my lady!" Toot-toot saluted again.

Marcone, Hendricks, and all of the Alphas except Billy, who'd seen something like this before, watched with various interpretations of bemusement as Toot-toot flew on his dragonfly wings over to the cloud of little lights swerving above the now slightly shredded pizza boxes and, drawing his orange box knife, uttered a high-pitched war cry and led them charging off. I could tell Marcone was just itching to ask me about the 'Za-Lady' thing and Billy was itching to ask me about Marcone, but tough luck. I reclaimed my staff and the tackle box.

"Alphas, to your places. Keep in touch with one another." 

The young people dispersed, some to wait by the gates for the Taste to open and some to stand guard outside the barriers. Just me, Marcone, and our lucky chaperone. Because apparently we needed one. Hell's bells.

"Well, clean-up's your area of expertise, so I guess I'll leave you to it," I told Marcone. "I've got to go set up."

"Are you certain you don't require any assistance?" Marcone asked.

Hendricks had already gathered up the empty boxes and, unfortunately, the nearest trash can was in the same direction I was going. 

"Yup," I said. "You can go back home and babysit your little mob friend; I've got this."

"Forgive me if I'd prefer to err on the side of caution. I have a vested interest in the success of this operation as well."

Hey, it was worth a try. "Well, Melanie, don't come crying to me if you get bird crap in your hair again."


	7. Chapter 7

We ended up in a strip of greenery between the Lakefront Trail and the harbour walkway, not very far from where Marcone and I had spent the night. I felt my face grow hot again. _Really?_ I thought. _Really, Harry? Get a grip._

As locations for delicate spellwork went, it wasn't ideal. But with the little trees to the east and the big trees to the west, it at least wasn't quite out in plain sight. I set my things down and picked the most level patch of ground I could find. Then I flicked open my little pen knife and started cutting a large circle into the ground. This was the easy part, and I used it as a kind of moving mediation, clearing my mind and focussing my attention. If I tried to do this with Marcone on the brain, I'd make a mistake, and I couldn't afford that.

Once I finished the circle, I scored a five-pointed star inside it. Then I took a spool of wire out of my portable thaumaturgy kit. Thaumaturgy is _noisy_ —and occasionally messy—when it goes wrong, and my apartment has been blown up enough times, thank you. So Molly and I went on the occasional field trip, and I'd picked up a fisherman's tackle box to hold what we needed, thus freeing up space in my backpack for more sandwiches. It's totally worth having Molly as an apprentice just for her mom's cooking.

To a casual glance, the inside of the kit looks like a tackle box, too, although there are hardly any hooks. Lots of string, wire, and bright bits of metal, though. Also powders, beads, and stones. I unspooled the wire and pressed it into the grooves I'd just made, where it wouldn't catch the sunlight. The perfect circle is always best, but they're a bitch to freehand. The really important part is joining the ends, which I did, although I didn't make the effort of will necessary to close it yet.

I put the wire away and dug a wad of pipe-cleaners out of the bottom of the kit. Then I sat down cross-legged inside the circle and started to fold them. Pipe-cleaners are awesome, by the way. Cats love them, toddlers love them, they come in a variety of whimsical colours, and they'll hold a shape. Plus they're really cheap. I don't know how I lived so long without pipe-cleaners.

Today, I tried to stick with the greens, browns, and yellows, frequently consulting a much-crumpled piece of paper. I wished Bob were here to double-check, but being a spirit of air and intellect instead of simply an animated skull, he doesn't do that well in daylight.

"Do I recognise that?" Marcone asked me after I'd finished arranging the twisted pipe-cleaners in a circle maybe ten feet across and started making another outside it, dropping smooth stones from one of my duster pockets between its symbols.

"Assuming you somehow read the police reports during werewolf-palooza way back when, probably, yes."

"You think our opponent is that dangerous."

"I think I don't want to take any chances," I said.

Marcone was standing outside the outer circle, even with me and facing the opposite direction. He was, I realised, _watching my back_.

"I realise it pains you when we're both on the same side, but you're right to take action," Marcone said, voice pitched too low for Hendricks, covering the other side, to hear.

"It's not that. It's—" I made a face. "I'm sure Gard has told you all about the White Council."

"Of course."

Of course. 

"Well, they have laws. Break 'em and you're dead. Transforming others is number two."

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Marcone nod. My hands kept bending wires covered in acrylic fuzz. "You are a Warden now, sworn to uphold these laws."

"Regional commander, actually. Not that I do much commanding."

"That blood on your cloak was from such an execution. I was unaware anyone had been practicing black magic in Chicago." There was a tightness to Marcone's voice, like he was pissed off something might have happened in Chicago without his knowing about it.

"Wasn't local; Chicago's off-limits to the Reds. Safe as anyplace," I told him evenly.

"Wouldn't the Council usually handle such matters at their headquarters? One would assume they were sufficiently protected."

"Marcone, if I understood how the Senior Council thought, I'd shoot myself in the head," I said testily.

My hands kept moving. And, for some reason, I kept talking.

"I figure with your inability to restrain your stalkerish impulses, you probably know as much about my childhood as anyone." Well, any vanilla mortal. Actually, I didn't have a clue what the official records said after Justin took me in. God knew what he'd actually signed, although it had been legitimate enough for the school; I supposed he could have just mind-whammied everyone. And had the Council even bothered with the mundane paperwork? Nobody had declared me dead in the fire, at least.

And I had no idea what Gard had been able to dig up on me. Pretty much everyone on the White Council knows who I am and what my story is. I mean, for a while there I was the most interesting thing since sliced bread. I don't care how long you live: people are people, and people love a good scandal. But wizards mostly only talk to other wizards. Gard was...not a member of the Council, anyway. Probably not entirely human.

"The house fire. I noticed it was somewhat thematic."

John motherfucking Marcone, everybody.

"Yeah, well, it helped explain the charred corpse."

Marcone went very, very still. I could feel him standing there, waiting and thinking furiously.

"There were reasons," I went on. "You know. Obviously, or I wouldn't be here. But it was a possibility for a while."

"You said Wizard McCoy was your mentor," Marcone said after a stretched silence, during which I moved on to the third ring of symbols.

"Second mentor."

Justin DuMorne had been my first. He adopted me. He told me I was special, when nobody else thought I was worth spit. He taught me magic, brought me _Elaine_. I loved him like a father, when it hurt too much to love my real father because he'd died and left me so alone.

When I was sixteen, he tried to kill me. Miraculously, although I'd hardly been more of a candidate for divine intervention back then than I was now, I'd managed to kill him instead.

But the upshot was that my introduction to the wider supernatural world had been with a bag over my head. I could still remember how completely it had blocked the light, the smell of mothballs, like it had been pulled out of a drawer somewhere of others just like it, one more in an endless line. Nothing of importance at all. I didn't even have a face.

I realised my hands were still. Gathering up the leftover pipe-cleaners, I stood to survey my work. More visible than scratching in the dirt would have been, but also more stable, and I had to hope the sorcerer would be in too much of a hurry to notice.

Satisfied, I prepared what I would need for the second part of the trap: a power-blocking ritual. Plan A was for Toot-toot to find the Bird Sorcerer before he could change the next kid and pluck one of his feathers. Bird Sorcerer would almost certainly chase Toot, who would lead him to me. I'd trap Bird Sorcerer somewhere in the overkill circle, which would give me time to work the power-blocking spell. Then we could bundle him off somewhere without fear of magical attack or escape, find out where in the Nevernever he'd stashed the kids, and call the Wardens for a little bloody execution and cake. Hooray.

Plan B was essentially the same as Plan A, except it assumed we couldn't save the seventh kid. In that case, the Alphas and the faeries were supposed to catch the kid-turned-bird and we'd worry about turning him back later. Hence the butterfly nets.

As with most of my plans, it went wrong almost as soon as I'd finished putting it together. I recognised the greasy acridity of the Bird Sorcerer's magic as it boiled up.

"So much for Plan A," I muttered. "Marcone, get out of sight."

I peered through the trees. I could just pick out something circling in the air above Grant Park—flying the circle, scribing it with movement. The smell-taste of the spell intensified, and I clenched my hands into fists. I was too far away; I'd known I would be. Couldn't have people walking all over those painstakingly-shaped symbols. I'd hoped—but Bird Sorcerer had moved too fast, and I had to be out here to nab him. It takes more than just a haphazard drop of blood to activate a greater circle of summoning.

I couldn't see Toot-toot against the blue of the sky, but the black dot changed course abruptly. Coming my way. I adjusted my position along the outermost circle and crouched down, my eyes half-lidded, tracking their progress more with my magical senses than my vision. My gathered will was a pressure on my temples and the back of my neck. I took out my pen-knife again and pricked my finger, careful not to let any of the blood drip yet.

There was another flare of tainted magic, a tenuous web reaching out in all directions. _Oh shit_ , I thought. _I probably should have seen that coming._

Birds rose into the air. They came out of the trees that were everywhere in this part of town. They came from their roosts in the odd architectural corners of Chicago's skyscrapers. They came from the streets and sidewalks where they scrounged after the scraps and leavings of humanity. They came from the air above the long lake. Gulls, pigeons, crows, raptors, falcons, songbirds. They took to the air with a sound like a million drums.

And they were all real. 

Toot was close enough I could see him swerving wildly to avoid the fastest and nearest birds, already swooping on him. I tried to keep track of Bird Sorcerer, but his energy was everywhere now. _Hell's bells_ , I thought desperately. _Come on, Harry. Think._

Birds were closing in on every side, chasing the glowing orb of Toot's faerie light. But Bird Sorcerer wasn't a thrall: he was the one doing the thinking. He'd want to cut Toot off—and so, ipso facto, he'd still be coming straight at me. 

I closed my eyes and concentrated on the circle to the exclusion of everything else. Between the darkness behind my eyelids and the noises overhead closing in rapidly, setting aside my fear was hard work, and I distantly felt myself break out in a sweat. 

Attuned as I was, I felt it immediately when the spike of intent crossed the circle. I squeezed blood and will out into the form I'd cut into the grass without even having to open my eyes, and as the pentacle came awake, its lines crossing the concentric rings contained inside, they all sprang to life at once, before Bird Sorcerer could make it out the other side. The figure of High Magic hummed, bright and solid to my magical perceptions.

I opened my eyes and recoiled. For a second, all I could see was the corpse of a young woman sprawled across another greater circle of summoning, her blood soaking into a hardwood floor, its scent not quite masked by the lingering traces of incense. 

"Harry!"

Something hit me in the shoulder and knocked me the rest of the way down. I didn't go gracefully, one leg bent beneath me at a painful angle. Hands were pushing my head down, and I felt the electric buzz of another wizard.

"Hey!" I objected, flailing mostly with my elbows. 

"Ow!" I have sharp elbows. Something slammed into the body above mine. "Owfuck!"

"Grasshopper?" I paused in my struggles.

Molly's chant came out a little squeaky, but her shield stopped the next impact. Molly is much more sensitive than I am, but the brute-force stuff comes a lot harder for her. I'd explained the theory to her and had her try to deflect some pencil erasers, but I'd been holding off really drilling her until winter, when we could use snowballs.

"Shit, Harry, they're freaking out!" Molly gasped.

"What? No, he should be cut off." I managed to lift my head, expecting to see Bird Sorcerer trying to break through the circle, either still as a bird or in his natural form.

What I saw was a foreshortened view of a woman sprawled on the grass. She was small, with short, greying blonde hair, and her face was fixed in a fierce expression, eyes wide open and staring. They were light blue, almost grey. The angle of her head on her neck couldn't have been mistaken for anything natural.

"No," I said softly. "But...no, it wasn't supposed to—"

Molly bit out a sharp cry as something broke through her shield. She tugged at me, but I was frozen in shock.

"Get her out of here!" Marcone growled.

I jerked, practically ripping down the pentacle-circle, spilling all the energy out. There was no flicker from the little figure with the mad eyes. No life, no magic, not even a death curse.

I felt another set of hands close on my arm and haul me upright. My vision went hazy, the sound of wings filling my head, which was empty of all other thought. I was distantly aware of Marcone barking orders, and then I was being shoved inside an SUV. The door slammed shut, and the hellish clamour became abruptly muted and distant.

"Harry. Harry, put your head down." There was a hand on the back of my neck. I acceded to its gentle pressure until my head was down between my knees. The hand stayed where it was, its weight somehow comforting. 

"Are you all right?" Molly's anxious voice asked. "Harry? What did you do? Get off her!"

"Miss Carpenter, be quiet." I knew vaguely that that should upset me, but all I could see was the dead woman in the circle.

"Breathe." It was Marcone's voice, I realised. I was hugging myself, wheezing unevenly, just this side of hyperventilation.

"It wasn't supposed to happen like that," I said. "She was just—"

"I know. It happens sometimes. Just try to breathe."

Stars. Breathe. Yes. I squeezed my damp eyes shut and fought to bring my body back under control. I'd had a shock; I hadn't been expecting it. But I had seen people die before. I'd even killed a few. I'd been mad enough, on a level I try not to let influence my actions, to kill Bird Sorcerer—Sorceress. Stars above, I'd known the Council was going to execute her for transforming those kids. It had just managed to hit a couple of my buttons, was all. Throw in a house fire and I'd have really flipped my lid.

I pulled myself together. Gradually, I unclenched a little, and I found I didn't have to fight so hard for air. I felt a faint snuffling at my face and discovered Mouse regarding me with concern. Apparently deciding I needed some more tangible form of reassurance, he licked basically my entire face with one swipe of his gigantic dog tongue. I didn't quite manage a smile at that, but something eased inside me. 

Marcone's hand was still on my neck, but he didn't try to keep me down. It lingered there for a beat once I was upright again, then withdrew. Now that my eyes were focussing again, I looked up to find Molly watching me and Marcone with huge eyes. I was sitting between the two of them in the back seat of an SUV, Mouse wedged into the space between the middle row of bucket seats.

I realised a little belatedly that I had just crossed some sort of line with Marcone. Then I remembered what other lines I'd crossed with Marcone and decided to stop thinking about any of it and carry on like everything was normal. 

It occurred to me that we were moving. "Hey, where are we going?"

"A building I own. It's not far, and we can park off the street. Unless you had something else in mind."

"Harry? Are you okay?" Molly's gaze was darting back and forth between me and Marcone. She looked almost as close to wigging out as I had been a minute ago.

"Yeah, sorry about that, grasshopper. Setting a bad example." I shook my head. "It's all right. Criminal slimeboss is on our side this time."

Molly sat back; she didn't look very convinced. "If you say so."

"I need to get in touch with Billy and Toot. And Murphy, hell's bells; I left all sorts of—"

"It's been taken care of," Marcone said.

"Dammit, Marcone!" It was good to be back in familiar territory. From the expression on Marcone's face, he knew it, too.

"Mister Hendricks was able to recover your staff and supplies. The body and the rest of it should be cleared by now. Due to the generalised avian disturbance, it's probable no one even witnessed what happened."

"The what now?"

"The birds." Molly crossed her arms, glaring at Marcone. "They lost it about when you closed the circle. Is there a bad guy still out there?"

"For certain values of 'bad guy' and 'out there', but that's not what happened to the birds. I don't know what Bird Sorceress was using to control them like that, but when it cut out all at once, I think it kind of scrambled them. Hopefully they'll go back to normal."

"Or else Chicago becomes Bodega Bay?" Well, so maybe Thomas and Inari aren't the only bad influences on my apprentice.

"Well, we could all move to Undertown." There, that was my cheery thought for the day. "Okay, first step is—"

I was interrupted when a hard turn threw me against Molly.

"Motherfucking Christ," Cujo—of course it was Cujo—swore from the driver's seat. "Sorry," he apologised, I assume to Marcone. "Power steering's out."

Oops? Molly and I exchanged a look, still all piled on top of each other, and simultaneously burst out into gales of slightly-hysterical laughter.

"Hey, what's that on your neck? Did you get, like, noshed by a vampire or something?"

I turned bright red. "Um..."

"Wait, did you actually...?" Molly asked in tones of hushed excitement.

Abruptly, I felt the weight of Marcone's gaze on me, even though I couldn't see him. I sagged back into my own seat, covering my eyes with the back of my hand. "It's _nothing_ ," I told them both. I let my hand fall.

"Okay, assuming we're not all about to be arrested, I need to call some people and talk to Toot. If I didn't turn him into bird feed," I said, grimacing.

"Never fear, my lady of pizza!" a small voice erupted from somewhere in Mouse's shaggy coat. "Though I was hounded on every side by the vicious foe, I accomplished my mission!"

I blinked as Toot emerged, brandishing a smallish striped feather. It looked like he was hacking his way through a jungle. He shimmied up Mouse's long ruff and sat atop my dog's head. Mouse twitched an ear but otherwise didn't seem to be at all disturbed by being used as a faerie jungle-gym.

"Although to be fair the protector beast helped a lot," Toot allowed. "Here!"

"Great work, guys." I accepted the feather, rolling the quill between my fingers. "Well, it's nothing local. Don't look so surprised, Marcone. I did actually learn more in my misspent youth than how to burp the alphabet."

"I'll try to contain myself," Marcone said drily. "I believe we have arrived."


	8. Chapter 8

As soon as I climbed out, I was swarmed by agitated faeries. I must have still been a little wild around the eyes, not to mention clutching my wizard's staff a little tighter than I needed to, because Toot launched himself off of Mouse's head and zipped around me in a defensive spiral, chasing the smaller balls of light back. Then he shot off across the dim parking garage, taking the rest of the lightshow with him. Okay.

I looked around. Hendricks was whispering something in Marcone's ear, even though those verdigris eyes were still fixed on me. I jerked my head at Molly. She bit her lip, hesitating, but slunk after me anyway.

We didn't say anything until we'd gotten out of earshot of Marcone and Hendricks. Molly crossed her arms and met my eyes almost as pointedly as Marcone habitually did. I managed to reign in my anger, or at least my mouth, and took a moment to really look at my apprentice before I went flying off the deep end. Let's hear it for anger management.

Molly had been as tall as her mother for a while now; she hit her growth spurt earlier than I had when I was a kid, but stopped half a foot or so before I finally had. I wouldn't say she was a late bloomer, but it was only in the last year or so that she'd really filled out, achieving the graceful proportions of a woman grown. Also something she'd managed earlier than me—which is to say my proportions still lie just a hair outside the Golden Ratio. _Molly_ was dressed for summer, although not so extremely as the Alphas, whose wardrobe choices are heavily influenced by how easy they are to skin out of. 

In fact, it really wasn't as bad as it could have been. Her shorts were black and possessed what an uncharitable person might have called an excess of zippers, but were long enough to accommodate a number of cargo pockets. She was wearing combat boots—since sandals don't really say punk. Her upper half was somewhat less practical, electric blue tube top under a ripped black fishnet shirt and her golden hair shaved up one side and falling in a no-doubt artistic mess over the other, covering one kohl-smeared blue eye. Since last fall she'd at least replaced the gold hoops she wore in her ears and also not-her-ears with barbells and studs, which would be harder to tear out in a fight. Her only other jewellery was a plain leather thong tied around one wrist. The ensemble exposed a lot of youthfully firm flesh and the muscle she'd been building up since I started bringing her along to my stick-fighting lessons. It's important for a woman to know how to defend herself; it's even more important for a wizard—there's a war on, after all. 

Fading designs running from her fingertips to her elbows marked where she'd persuaded my upstairs neighbours' daughter to get her all hennaed up for Billy and Georgia's wedding last month. The less-traditional splash of brownscale graffiti spilling between her breasts and down to her navel probably hadn't been done by Caroline Baxingdale, though.

Yeah. When I'm looking at Molly, my friend's daughter, whom I met when she was still in pigtails and carrying around Lisa Frank notebooks, I try to remind myself that when I was in high school, it was still the eighties. I'm still trying to forget the Magical Perm Incident.

The point being that Michael and Charity's eldest wasn't a little girl anymore. She wasn't ready to dive headfirst into the current Faerie Madness, which was why I'd told her to go home; and she hadn't damn well listened and she should have, and I was pissed and scared for her safety. But simply flipping out at her wasn't going to make her listen—I'd seen the way she dug in when Charity used that tactic all too often. Molly was old enough, had seen enough that she wasn't going to follow orders blindly. Not that she'd ever been particularly good at that part—witness all Charity's yelling and Molly's current appearance.

Besides, I'd had a few sharp lessons over the years about what happens when you try to protect people from the truth. I was supposed to be turning Molly into a responsible member of the supernatural community. People don't learn to respect power just because you tell them they should. They learn by having the reality of cause and effect pounded into their skulls, one way or the other. As the master in the master-apprentice equation, I was supposed to see this sort of shit coming and manage it so the effect didn't turn out to be a dead apprentice.

"You got a car," I said at last.

Molly's face coloured, but she held my gaze defiantly. "It's Inari's. The old one kept breaking down."

No kidding.

"I told you you'd need to learn how to drive stick."

"Harry—"

"What, grasshopper? What can I say? I told you to do something, and you ignored me." I felt the anger bubbling up in me again.

"But I wanted to _help_. Mom knows how to keep the Jawas safe; she didn't need me there."

"And it was boring?"

"It was—"

"What?" I demanded.

"It was what you would have done," Molly said, throwing up her arms. There were bloody scratches underneath some of the rips in her fishnet top. "Okay? It's what you would have done."

I was so flabberghasted I said the first thing that came to mind. "Well what the hell are you doing using me as a role model?" 

Molly's mouth froze half-open. Then, unable to control herself, she started laughing again. I groaned, slumping back against a red Mazda.

"I'm serious," I said. My attempt at earnestness was perhaps a trifle undercut by the way I was having a hard time suppressing my own snickers.

"Harry," Molly said quietly after a minute, "are you okay? That woman back there..."

I shrugged, glancing back in the direction we'd left Toot and Marcone. "Er, sorry about that. I was just a little off-balance, is all. She was the one behind the kidnappings. I knew I might end up fighting her if things went wrong, but I'd been concentrating on the trap. Wasn't ready for things to go the way they did."

Molly was silent for a long moment, contemplating the oil-stained concrete. "You don't—I— Look, I get it if you're pissed at me, but I still want to help." Molly looked back up, all the black makeup making her blue eyes look almost cartoonishly big.

"Hey, I trust you. Last fall, remember?"

Molly nodded. I thought she'd maybe already been thinking about last fall. 

"But I need you to trust me, too. I won't always be able to tell you everything, and I need to know I can depend on you to do what I tell you, whether or not it makes sense or you think I'm wrong or being a cast-iron bitch." I took a deep breath. "And I'll try not to treat you like a kid just on principle and remember it's not my job to stop you from growing up. It's my job to keep you from turning into a glass crater while you figure out how. Magic doesn't make us infallible; it just makes it more spectacular when we mess up." I brandished my gloved left hand to illustrate. It really was an effective teaching tool.

Molly clicked her tongue-piercing against her teeth. "Are we going to be able to get the kids back?"

"Well, there's still Plan C," I said. 

"Which is?"

"The reason you should never ask yourself 'WWHD?'"

Toot-toot had been hovering a little ways off for a while now. I couldn't see any of the rest of his posse, but that didn't necessarily mean they weren't still around. When I held out my hand palm-up, he swooped in for a landing.

"What's up? Any news on Plan B?"

"Oh, that." 

"Yes, that, Toot. Did your people get the bird to the wolves?"

Toot shifted uncomfortably, wringing his hands.

"General," I prodded.

"We tried, Harry!" Toot burst out. He stomped one little plastic-shoed foot, shaking loose a cloud of pixie dust. "It was too big."

"How big?" I asked. 

"As big as you."

Okay, that was big. 

"But Towhen followed it and he says it went through the Way over the lake that leads to the Cold Queen's fortress."

"Are you sure?" I asked.

Toot nodded vigorously. "Lough and Blueblossom saw it too." He hesitated. "Harry, we don't have to, like, go there, do we?"

I shook my head. "I've got something else for you guys here in Chicago."  
__ __ __

I went back to my office and made some calls. Marcone nagged me until I agreed to ride in his mob-mobile, even though I explained to him that there was no danger anymore, everything was either dead or in faerie. When we got to my building, I headed straight for the stairs. Marcone glanced once at the elevator, then followed me without a word of comment.

I'd given Molly my keys and some instructions, which she swore she really was going to follow this time, but Hendricks was still making like Mouse and, heh, dogging our footsteps. The Alphas had gotten side-tracked getting people undercover back at the Taste, and some of them had been detained for questioning. Alex and Greg both said they'd seen what sounded like a golden eagle, which in Toot's defence is a seriously large bird. Remember _The Rescuers Down Under_? That was a golden eagle. 

I listened to the Hitchcock-level update while watching Hendricks do a security sweep of my office, possibly out of reflex, possibly to irritate me. Marcone was on the far other end of the room, glued to his cell phone. Apparently, the call wasn't so important he was willing to actually leave the room to get clear reception.

I failed entirely to get hold of Murphy; the morning's chaos had apparently fallen squarely in SI's lap in a handle-this-crazy-shit-we're-running-an-actual-investigation-here way. That at least made me feel less guilty about getting the Alphas in trouble. Murphy was good people, and the Alphas had literally nothing to hide. I left a message for her to call me back, feeling shamefully relieved that I didn't have to have this conversation with Murphy yet. She was going to kick my ass six ways to Sunday. I was not looking forward to it.

When I came in I'd started a pot of coffee, so I was perched on the edge of my filing cabinets, waiting for it to perk. Hendricks stopped in front of my armchairs and stood staring down at my crappy plastic chess set. He reached out with one enormous hand and nudged a white pawn two spaces. 

Without really thinking about it, I leaned over and moved a black pawn forward. Hendricks grunted. He didn't think very long before making his next move.

Turns out he didn't really need to. Although in my defence, just the cognitive dissonance from discovering Cujo knew _how_ to play chess was enough to make my head spin. And I mean, I'm not the world's greatest chess player. I don't have the patience for it and I may occasionally have a hard time with things like subtlety. And rules. 

But still. I've sucker-punched faerie queens and busted up demonic conspiracies. I'm a wizard of the White Council, not to mention a trained PI. I've got, you know. Game. I thought, anyway.

"Hell's bells," I groused, staring in disbelief at the chess board.

"Checkmate," Hendricks rumbled.

I glared at him. Had that been _emotion_ in his voice? It had. Cujo was totally feeling intellectually superior to me. That was just wrong on so many levels.

Marcone coughed, and I switched my glare to him. When he'd finished his phone call, he'd come over and sat _at my desk_ , started drinking _my coffee_ , and watched us like we were freaking gazelles or something and it was dinner time. Under any other circumstances, it would have been hilarious, actually. I didn't know what Marcone was used to drinking, but I drank cheap it-may-once-have-been-part-of-a-tree-maybe coffee and covered up the taste by filling half the cup with sugar. Every time he took a sip he coughed to conceal, I was certain, a sound of existential pain, but he didn't stop drinking it. 

"Oh, shut up," I told Marcone.

"I wasn't saying anything."

"Did you know he could do that?" I complained.

Marcone somehow managed to radiate smugness without moving a muscle. "I taught him how to do that."

"Of course you did."

Thankfully, my office was suddenly overrun by werewolves, led by a vampire. The vampire was carrying several shopping bags. The werewolves were carrying food.

"Hey, look what followed me home," Thomas said. "Can I keep them?"

"Oh my god food." I gave Marcone's shoulder a shove. "Get out of my chair, Marcone."

"The lines were really short for some reason," Georgia said, dropping a couple red and white paper trays on the desk. I pounced on them eagerly. "And Lieutenant Murphy told us she wasn't going to question us at the station, but you're supposed to call her when it's over. And definitely before anything else blows up."  
__ __ __

After I'd consumed the first several hundred calories, I ruthlessly kicked everyone out and sat down with my thaumaturgy kit, the contents of my desk drawers, the stuff from Thomas' shopping bags, and as much of the food as I could reasonably snitch to make some magic.

Plan C wasn't, strictly speaking, really a new plan. I was pretty much always going to have to go into the Nevernever after the kids. I'd been hoping for some inside information, sure, but that had never been guaranteed either. 

I picked up the phone to make the call I hadn't wanted to with everyone else in the room but hesitated before dialling. This was black magic and human kids: I absolutely had a right to call in the Wardens for backup. And, no disrespect to how far the Alphas had come, if I could get trained combat wizards to back me up on this one, I wanted them. Under the Accords, we as the wronged party would be completely justified busting in wherever in Faerie those kids were being held, I was pretty sure.

On the other hand, free use of Winter's Ways was arguably the only reason the White Council hadn't folded like a card table before now, and I was supposed to be making up to the faeries and coaxing them into helping us bitchslap the Red Court back down to Tierra del Fuego. Not, you know, completely alienating them. If this thing was going where I thought it was going, it might be better to leave the rest of the Council out of it.

I made the call. I figured at least I could get a lead on someone who would have a better chance of changing the kids back without frying their brains than me, but it turned out I might as well not have bothered. I couldn't reach Ramirez, the other Warden on the continent. Which made sense when I called into HQ and learned there was some kind of trouble brewing in the Northwest. It was all I could do to persuade the Warden on dispatch that what I had going on here was time-sensitive. I'd also made a deal with Captain Luccio, the Wardens' commander, that I would take up the damned cloak so long as I didn't get called away from Chicago, on account of the Scamp.

I drummed my fingers on my desk after the call ended, scowling at the light leaking through my window blinds. One floated and clicked gently in the breeze; the window behind it was open. A few minutes later, the first of my couriers arrived.  
__ __ __

When I stuck my head back out into the hall, there was a bodyguard lurking by my door again. It was Andi, voted least-likely to ever be kicked out of anywhere, including bed for eating crackers. She was sitting with her legs tucked up under her and Mouse's head on her lap, scratching his ears. The hem of her skirt was showing quite a lot of muscular, bronzed thigh in that position. I repaid Mouse for the look he'd given me this morning, with interest. He didn't look very ashamed.

"Everybody else go outside to eat Marcone?" I asked her. "I appreciate them not getting him all over the carpet."

"We thought we'd get out of your hair," Andi said. "Everyone else went to the café across the street; I don't know where the, uh, other guys went."

"It's okay, you can say crooks. I've heard the term before."

Andi flashed me a nervous grin. "I can call them if you're ready for us now," she offered, pulling out a cellphone and pushing a button. She paused then, muffling it against her ample chest. "That one guy is really hot; is he your new boyfriend?"

"What? I—of course not. I don't have a—a boyfriend," I spluttered. I had to agree that Marcone was really hot, though. Damn his eyes. "He got mixed up in the kidnappings all on his own. And he's a criminal. Which I already said. So."

Andi raised her eyebrows. "I was talking about the guy with the hair."

I froze in the doorway with a big _oops_ written pretty transparently across my face. "Oh. Him."

"But if you'd like to tell me who _you_ were talking about..."

I scowled down at Andi. "Thomas is White Court; I'd keep my knees together if I were you."

"You must really like whoever it is. Nice hickey, by the way."

"Oh, just call the Twilight Bark already," I told her, then retreated back into my office to nurse my wounded pride, slamming the door behind me. I tried to feel like a wizard, and not like my two-year-old in a snit. 

The Scoobies came thundering up, and Marcone crawled out from whatever rock he'd been hiding under, and no way was I going to ask where Thomas had been when he was looking that rumpled. At least no one else was looking rumpled. Besides me, I mean.

I surveyed everyone's faces when I'd finished outlining the plan. "That's it. Anyone wants out, now's the time."

Silence. My friends are all as stupid as I am. And, judging by Marcone's continued involvement, my enemies. So there was that.

"So if the portal's way up there, do we get to go up the invisible staircase again?" Billy asked.

"No penthouse view this time," I replied. "Alternate route."

Billy looked disappointed, by my knees were just as glad. I told them where we were going and drafted help to lug the stuff down to my car.

"Hey, Marcone," I said, hanging back by the door to my office building.

Marcone, about to step out onto the street, paused. He cocked his head to one side, his expression one of polite inquiry. "Yes?"

"You're committed to getting Trevor Abbascia back, right?"

Marcone's eyes flashed coldly, a glacial, wintery pale green. "We're going to get all of them back."

There was absolutely no reason that his patient, homicidal certainty should be giving me the warm fuzzies. But somewhere under my own anger and automatic response of _damn right we are_ , my stomach was doing a little happy flip-flop. 

"Good," I said.  
__ __ __

We pulled into the parking lot behind an abandoned greenhouse way out on the west side of town. There was already a motorcycle gleaming incongruously on the faded and cracked tarmac. The grass and weeds sprouting up through the cracks around it were taller and more verdant than the ones growing in the rest of the lot.

The rest of our convoy arrived while Thomas, Mouse, and I were piling out of the Beetle. Everything except the Beetle looked wildly out of place, although the incredibly suspicious-looking white van Marcone had apparently traded in for came closest. 

A trail of tall, waving grass liberally interspersed with bright dandelions and other wildflowers led to a pair of young people standing by the cracked plexiglass panels. Both had long, straight white hair and an unmistakably supernatural ability to wear tight pants and make it look good.

"Hi," I said, walking up to them. "Thanks for showing."

Lily gave me a slight bow. Beside her, Fix inclined his head but kept his eyes on the others coming up behind me.

"Lily, Fix, you remember Billy and the Alphas."

Billy nodded, also obviously sizing up Fix, who had been shorter than him and a lot more noodley the last time they met, and the business-like rapier hanging at his side. "Been awhile. Looks like you've done all right for yourselves."

"You too. Congratulations."

Billy and Georgia exchanged a truly sappy look. "Thanks. Er, your word to us has been good, forsooth. No Summer fae have transgressed on our demesne." 

I raised my eyebrows. This was news to me, but it made sense. Lily owed the Alphas for their part in the Battle of the Stone Table—even though they had been acting under my aegis at the time—and the sidhe don't like being in the red. The thought of Billy making deals with faeries worried me, though.

"I am glad you are satisfied," Lily said, smiling a little at Billy's game-night vocabulary. "And who are these others?"

"Mouse, Marcone, Thomas, and Hendricks," I answered. "In order of descending intelligence. Guys, Lily and Fix, the Summer Lady and Summer Knight."

Thomas was making a weird face at me, although whether it was because I'd put the dog first on the list or because of surprise faeries I couldn't tell. He'd lived with Mouse as long as I have, though; he couldn't really argue.

I turned my head to look at Marcone properly for the first time since he'd rolled up and my jaw almost hit the ground. He and Hendricks had both ditched their suits in favour of black fatigue-ish things. It was kind of hard to tell under the chain mail. There was a sword at Marcone's hip and a rifle slung across his back; Hendricks had an axe. Both were also sporting visible knives. Well, they'd sure figured out faeries don't like iron.

Everybody—including Mouse, ha—made polite noises while I tried to get over the image of Marcone dressed as Rambo Goes to Camelot. By the time Lily turned back to me, I had mostly managed it.

"I am not sure what help I can be to you," Lily apologised. 

Like I said before: faerie power games. I thought I'd figured out a way around this one, though. I nodded.

"Well, that's kind of why I asked you here. I, too, have debts I must repay. I owe John Marcone a life-debt; yours has passed to him." 

I gave Marcone a hard look. If he screwed me over here, I was going to drop-kick him off the top of Sears Tower.

Fix choked; he wasn't the only one. Hendricks was looking between me and Marcone with an indecipherable expression on his smushed face, which Marcone was ignoring. Marcone ignored everything but me for a sharp beat, and then he was back on track. 

Lily's eyebrows flew into graceful arcs. Fix was now looking at me like he thought I was some kind of shape-shifter. I guess they knew who Marcone was. 

"A life for a life; it is meet. Do you deem it so, Sir Marcone?" Lily asked. If she had any misgivings about what the crime kingpin of Chicago could do with a debt from a queen of faerie, she was doing a good job of hiding it.

"Yes," Marcone said, meeting her gaze squarely. 

"So mote it be." Lily dipped her head in acknowledgement. "What would you ask of me?"

I shouldn't have worried. "A child was abducted from under my guest-hold. My society takes such a violation as seriously as does your own. I have discovered," _I, Marcone?_ I thought sourly, but didn't interrupt, "that he was transformed and taken across to the provinces of Winter. It is imperative that I recover the child and restore him to his father, if possible alive, unharmed, and in a timely fashion."

"You will have all the aid it is in my remit to provide," Lily said. "Do you know where in Winter the child has been taken?"

Some usually-banked fire blazed up in Marcone's eyes. In that instant, he didn't look anything like a business man. He looked like a knight setting out to face a dragon. "Arctis Tor."

Fix covered his eyes with one hand, shaking his head. Lily broke character to give me a pained look.

Okay, so I may not have given them all the details over the phone. 

"Hey, I didn't tell the bad guys where to go," I protested. 

"Would you please explain your previous remark?" Marcone asked, firmly steering us all back to business.

"They're not always free to act," I said. "Lily has to answer to the other Summer Queens, Titania and Mother Summer."

"And one of them has forbidden her from aiding you in this matter?"

"Naw, something else. Faerie power-games. You know. And she can't just go trucking around Winter blowing up chunks of it without starting another civil war."

"I'm afraid I'll have to leave the blowing things up to you, Harry. I can open the Way, but so deep into Winter it will require all my power to maintain. And Fix will have to stay behind as guard." Lily turned back to Marcone. "I think you would not like the denizens of Winter given free run of Chicago."

Yeah, Lily definitely knew who Marcone was. 

"Indeed not," Marcone agreed. "You will undertake to provide us safe passage between here and Arctis Tor and hold the gate until our return to this place?"

"You have my word on it, sir."

Marcone nodded. "Agreed, then."

"Okay, kids, you remember the drill," I said breaking the moment. I fished a small jar out of one of the pockets of my duster and uncapped it. "For those of you in the remedial class, this is in case of glamours and illusions. Because, well, faeries. Nice guns, by the way," I said aside to Marcone and Hendricks.

"Steel-jacketed rounds," Marcone said.

"You do remember the part where gunpowder isn't always combustible in the Nevernever, right?"

There was the hint of a grimace. "I'm hardly likely to forget. But I'll take my chances."

Marcone was also wearing a bandoleer of throwing knives. Between that and the sword and the mail, I figured he probably was adequately prepared. But I couldn't resist one last dig, so as I stepped up to apply the ointment, I said, "Here's another tip: don't fall into any deep water."

I could feel Marcone deliberately not reacting to my thumb in gouging-proximity to his eyes. I'd backwards-engineered the ointment from the stuff the Gatekeeper had given me the last time I found myself invading a faerie sanctum, albeit a little imperfectly. I couldn't complain about the improved odour, but it left a lingering, dark stain behind. It's possible I may have smeared the gunk around on Marcone more than was necessary. What can I say? I'm petty like that.

Marcone blinked his eyes open, and they found mine automatically. I realised I was still cupping his face, my thumb covering the bruise on his cheekbone. I jerked back like I'd been stung.

"Right. Hold still, Cujo," I said, and continued on down the line, flatly ignoring the look Thomas gave me when I touched him. And before. And after. Maybe it had less to do with being an incubus and more to do with having eyes.

I came to Mouse, who cocked his head a me sceptically as soon as I got near him with the jar.

"What? All the cool kids are doing it," I told him. 

No response.

"You say that now, but when the fur starts flying and the faeries are twisting the fabric of reality into pretzels, who're you going to come crying to then, huh?"

My dog sneezed at me.

"Hey, you're the one who invited himself along, buddy."

Wag.

I sighed. "Suit yourself."

Mouse gaped his fangy, doggy grin.

"Christ, that's unnatural," rumbled Hendricks, who looked even more like a football player than ever now.

Marcone raised an eyebrow at him. Hendricks made a rueful face and grunted.

"What, did you think that was an arbitrary list, Cujo?" 

"Can't say I'm surprised you lost an argument with a dog."

"Tell you what, next time I'll let you argue with him; I could use a good laugh." I clapped my hands together. "All right, everybody suit up!"

The Alphas were already stripping and melting into their wolf-shapes. Each of them was something like Mouse's weight but even taller, lean and savage. It was gratifying to see the effect on Hendricks, amused hostility giving way to wariness as a bunch of naked twenty-somethings abruptly became a couple tons of predator. The last time we were all together like this, it had been night, and Hendricks had had a night-vision scope and several dozen yards between him and the Alphas. The kids were a lot better at being wolves, now. I was pack and Marcone and Hendricks weren't, and they knew it. You can feel it, when that much animal is watching you.

Thomas was holding himself very carefully, a predator outnumbered and in someone else's territory. I checked on Lily and Fix; neither of them seemed unduly alarmed. Well, fair enough. I don't care how big your teeth are: a queen of faerie is nothing to sneeze at.

"Right," I said and went to get the rest of what we'd need from the storage compartment under the Beetle's hood.

Marcone fell in step beside me, Hendricks following like a shadow. "I thought you said all I did was swear at a pregnant woman."

I scowled. "I was thinking of last year." The year before would have done in a pinch, too. Stars, Marcone saved my life way too often. I wasn't sure if the fact I'd saved his hide at least as frequently made up for it or made it that much more alarming. He'd been worming his way into my life for such a long time now.

"Of course; I should have realised."

"Yeah, well, try and be a little quicker on the uptake. We're playing with the big boys, now," I told him. "Here, make yourselves useful." 

Between the three of us, we managed all the harnesses in one trip. I had Marcone and Hendricks lay them out in a row on the cracked asphalt walkway. The Alphas came over to investigate, jostling companionably, and I waved them in closer.

"Okay, I need some volunteers, whoever's best at running. Whoever's best at tearing shit apart, you'll be on guard duty. Runners get to be moving targets. There are seven harnesses; Mouse, you're the golden eagle because you gave me attitude."

Mouse shook his ruff at me but went where I pointed. His harness went on easily because I'd used him as a mannequin for the first one, to figure out what I was doing. I'd spent most of the afternoon on the harnesses. They weren't huge magic, but they weren't a cakewalk, either, not doing seven of them. There was a summoning and a binding, and they'd all had to be tied together, the forces and principles involved carefully calculated. Each harness itself was made of paracord, which is what happens when I send Thomas out for supplies. He hides the receipts from me and laughs off any efforts on my part to even things up, even when the bags are clearly from places with a mark-up at least ten times higher than it needs to be. And then Bob makes sugar-daddy comments the whole time I'm working.

The most time-consuming aspect, physically, had been the knotwork pouches to hold the thaumaturgical loci I'd sent Toot and his people out to get. None of the victims had been locals, except for Ayden Washington, and I already had bits from him and Trevor Abbascia, who'd been staying behind Marcone's wards. Hotel rooms don't have thresholds, so it had been a simple matter for the Wee Folk to nip in and grab some stray hairs. They were the anchors of the spell, and I wanted to eliminate even the least little bit of chance that they might fall out or something.

More complex magically was the binding. I double-checked as I went along to make sure the binding-ends didn't dangle enough to trip my couriers. As far as I knew, the golden eagle was the only really big bird, but then the only ones I knew about for sure were the eagle, owl, and falcon, and there's a pretty big range of owls, size-wise. For the rest, I could be dealing with anything from a hummingbird to an albatross, which made things a little tricky.

I was never a girl scout or in the Navy or whatever, and I don't think I want to know where Thomas learned about knots because some of the ones he ties now and then make me deeply suspicious; but my dad was a stage magician, and I'd arguably learned more about rope than magic at Eb's. So once the Alphas all stopped chasing their tails, I got the harnesses together and the spells on them primed in fairly short order.

Lily and I exchanged a nod, and we all followed her into the dilapidated greenhouse, checking to make sure I still had the feather hanging around my neck. The late afternoon sunlight filtering through the dingy, translucent panels gave everything a faded, almost sepia tone. The grass and weeds inside were dead and dry, except where Lily had passed. Most of the debris were either leaning against the curved walls or the rickety tables that had been stacked on top of one another, leaving a long, sort of clear space down the middle of the greenhouse. Lily and Fix had gone all the way down to one end, where they'd drafted Thomas into helping wrestle the remains of an arbour upright in front of the door. An old cavalry sabre hung at one of my brother's hips, a big knife at the other.

I elbowed my way to the front of the crowd. The arbour had apparently been arranged to Lily's satisfaction, and she was looking at it with an uncharacteristic expression of determination on her face. 

"Ready to go?" I asked her.

Lily mustered a smile that was downright grim. Well, there's a reason they call it Arctis Tor and not Candyland. "If Sir Marcone is?"

I raised my eyebrows expectantly at Marcone. He eyebrowed coolly back, then turned his attention back to Lily, expression serious and professional. "I believe we are."

Lily took a step towards the arbour. Fire started twining up around her shapely calves; everybody else fell back, including Fix.

The flames licked higher, resolving into a flutter of fiery butterflies. Lily didn't move, and her eyes were closed; but the butterflies streamed out to trace the rickety arbour's arc. Round and around; it took me a moment to see past the orange-red flickers to the frozen landscape beyond. The Way was open. Slick.

It was eerie, looking into the icy mountains at the heart of winter from out here, with summer air thick in my lungs and sweat trickling down my back. I could feel Marcone holding his breath, all his attention on Lily's portal. I nudged him in the shoulder.

"What're we standing around for?"

The wreath of fire had subsided somewhat, enough that it didn't look like you'd automatically get scorched trying to go through. I resettled my grip on my staff and stepped up. As I did so, one of the butterflies detached itself from the arbour and hovered in the air in front of me. I looked a question at Lily.

"The deal was for safe passage. That includes not letting you freeze to death."

"I guess that makes sense."

Lily smiled. "Good luck, Harry." 

Because I was going to need it. "Thanks, Lily."

Marcone inclined his head gravely, almost a bow. All he needed was a shield, and maybe a lady's silk favour tied around his arm. Could Marcone ride a horse?

I shook my head. Ridiculous.


	9. Chapter 9

The first thing I did on the other side was draw a circle and run a tracking spell on Ayden Washington. Worked like a charm. "It's so hard being right all the time."

"You just keep telling yourself that, Harry," Fix said.

I turned around. "I thought you were staying behind with Lily."

"Easier to guard from this side," Fix explained. He lowered his voice. "Our observers say there's a battle underway—"

"Yeah, I figured. I'm guessing you're still deadlocked," I said. 

"Summer can't move without leaving ourselves vulnerable to an attack from Winter."

I shook my head, the pull of the spell shifting as I did. "Has anybody ever suggested therapy as an alternative to all this inter-court bitching?"

Fix snorted. "They'd eat a shrink alive. You have no idea."

"Oh, I don't know; I know this wolf—"

Georgia bared her teeth at me. Yikes.

"Aaanyway," I said, and started trudging through the knee-high drifts. 

The tracking spell was tugging me steadily in the direction of Arctis Tor. Surprise, surprise. I started suspecting Lily had slipped me a little something extra the second time her butterfly swooped over to an easier path over the less-than-friendly going. Unless you've got wings, a straight line is _not_ the fastest way through rough terrain. 

Mab's fortress was an ominous block of black ice. It was, predictably, situated near the top of the highest mountain in sight, contrasting starkly with the white snow even with sunset smearing shadows across the slopes. Like the lower jaw of some really big, really square-faced ogre who took extra care sharpening its teeth, a tower jutting up from its centre like the spear the ogre's skull had been impaled on. 

Cheery. A gust of wind blew up a curtain of snow in our faces, obscuring the view. I put a hand out, steadying Thomas, whom I'd been helping over some of the rough bits. Manly pride or not, my brother was a city boy, not to mention having the shortest legs of all of us bipeds. If the looks Marcone—who was keeping his footing just fine—kept shooting us got any sharper, Thomas would be scooping his guts out of the snow banks.

"You want a hand down, Melanie, all you have to do is ask," I told him.

Thomas looked at Marcone and cocked an eyebrow. "You going to take that?"

"All things considered, it could be worse," Marcone replied philosophically.

"I suppose it makes sense. She _is_ the stalker, after all."

"Thank you, Lydia. I'm glad to see someone appreciates the thought I put into these things." 

Thomas spluttered.

"Not Cathy?" Marcone asked.

"Cathy's with the rest of the birthday party." I waved my hand at the Alphas trotting behind us.

"I'm still a little surprised you didn't invite Murphy along," Thomas said. _Instead of this guy?_

"Are you kidding? Do you remember what happened to Annie Hathaway in the movie?" I joked, my eyes sliding towards Marcone. 

"Whatever you say, Mitch," Thomas said. At least, it sounded like Mitch.

"Careful, Tom," I warned.

"Wrong Hitchcock." 

Mouse was out front, breaking our trail. We were walking more or less in single file. In the event of an attack, I wasn't sure if being strung out like that would be a good thing or a bad thing. It probably depended on the kind of attack; so far, we were pretty much the only sign of life, though. I didn't know how much the cold was effecting the others—most of our party had fur coats, and I'd told Marcone where we were going ahead of time, so there was probably some Under Armor or something under his, well, armour. But I at least appreciated Lily's little heating-charm, dressed as I was in my duster and a 'Bigfoot doesn't believe in you either' tee-shirt. Hey, Bigfoot thought it was funny.

A few hundred yards out from the walls, Mouse stopped. Since I am not, all evidence to the contrary, a complete idiot, I stopped, too. I managed to signal the troops before we reenacted some slapstick pile-up, and we slunk up the last ridge to scope out our approach. 

"Gate's open," Thomas noted unhappily. "And I don't see anyone."

"Gate's gone," Hendricks corrected. I snuck a glance, but Marcone didn't have his hand up Cujo's back, so it wasn't even ventriloquism.

"We sure Mab's not Annie Hathaway?" Thomas asked me.

"I dare you to say that to her face," I told him. For my part, I was more worried about the large beastie flapping above the black ice pinnacle than the absence of gates or guardians. Maybe the place was stripped because everyone was off sticking their tongues out at Summer. Maybe it was a trap. Maybe it was just ambiance. We'd find out soon enough.

"Shall we?" Marcone asked.

I stood up and stepped out into the clear space before the fortress. Warily, the others followed. Even this far away, I could feel the currents of magic bending around a seriously major working. There was a pulse and suddenly a black cloud rose seemingly right out of the walls. It hovered for a few audible beats, until I realised I wasn't just picking up on the rhythm of whatever ritual was going on. The cloud heaved and surged. Ponderously, it started moving towards us. Well. That couldn't be good.

Perversely, I took a breath of cutting wind and let it out in a whistle of my own, keeping my pace fast but even as long as the approaching cloud was content merely to hover ominously in the faerie dusk. A groan from my left told me when Thomas recognised the tune of _Risseldy-Rosseldy_ , although the lyrics running through my head were actually to _Wee Cooper o' Fife_ , which Eb used to sing sometimes. 

There were about two hundred yards of open ground in front of the gate. My ointment paid off, letting us see through some typically dickish faerie maze in-between. We were only halfway across when the cloud descended on us, resolving into hundreds upon thousands of crows. I was getting sick of birds.

No way could I completely shield a group this big for any length of time. Instead, I aimed my biggest, messiest evocation of wind and force upwards. My focus on the tracking spell wavered, and I flung myself back into it desperately. 

We broke into a run; the snow was thinner here, but like most good surprises, it didn't last. The four-legged contingent easily pulled even, bunching up around the rest of us. I was abruptly conscious that Marcone, Hendricks, and I were now the ones slowing the group down. 

A sharp bark was all the warning we received before the bones started appearing underfoot. They were icy, some smashed, some melted, all but invisible in the snow, more slippery and likely to turn underfoot than the shadowy fragments of portcullis and grate. I flinched away from a crow diving at my face, and started whirling my staff over my head as I ran, praying I wouldn't fumble and sent it flying. Hell's bells, those things were huge.

"Ventas cyclis!"

The mounds of pale, mangled bones, piled higher and higher around and before us, were swept up in a sudden whirlwind with us at the eye. 

Unfortunately, all that meant was that the mounds of pale, mangled bones surrounding the fortress were real. I tried not to quail, looking at the violent gouges in Mab's walls. Anyone—court, council, or god—who could have done this could stomp me; but then, Mab could stomp me, and one of them couldn't stomp me any flatter than the other. 

I hadn't figured on being able to get the Alphas inside. I'd been fairly confident of getting myself inside one way or another if I needed to, but not everybody else. In the original plan, they'd have had to run around outside the fortress walls. It would have been a big circle, but size wasn't so much a factor. 

As we hauled ass under the great midnight walls, I caught a whiff of something that made my bowels shiver. Hellfire. I was starting to have a bad feeling about this.

In places, the bones rose higher than the snow drifts we'd been trudging through. I kept my shield bracelet primed in case someone was lurking in murder-holes overhead, in the time-honoured tradition. Halfway through the tunnel, I felt a great, ringing, twisting snap, like someone had broken a dry stick inside the hollow of my chest. The tracking spell went dead.

"Crap," I said under my breath. 

Everybody took that as a cue to look especially dour. Mentally, I cursed the bones clogging up the passage. If I tried to run through this, I'd break my ankle.

As soon as we emerged back into the falling night, something large came flying at my face.

"Go!" I shouted, ramming power through my shield bracelet. 

The shield flared into a silver-blue part-dome when the claws hit it—the Semurgh, I presumed. One of them. Bullets followed, pinging off in ricochets: Marcone and Hendricks returning fire. A scream of pain and rage rent the air. It wasn't quite a wolf's howl or a raptor's shriek; the sound was at once very similar to one produced by a human throat and completely, unmistakably inhuman. It was the sound of something ancient, and powerful, and unused to feeling pain. 

All the hairs stood up on my arms, and I froze like a rabbit in the grass. 

"Harry?" Thomas called.

"Ye-eah, got it covered," I called back, keeping an eye on the angry Semurgh's silhouette overhead. "What are you guys still doing here?"

Someone snarled a curse, followed by the sound of icy bones skittering and crunching underfoot. The Semurgh wheeled and swooped down again, and okay, Bob was right, that thing was big. Bigger than anything else I'd ever faced down, Clifford the Big Red Dog big and built like a pit bull, covered in feathers that glinted with the same pale, brittle light as the bones piled in the last rays of the dying sun. The sky disappeared every time it spread its wings.

I pointed my blasting rod and let rip. "Fuego!"

I threw my weight behind the blow, but I don't think it did much more than piss the Semurgh off. The real effect was to build a sudden updraft beneath those gigantic wings. It forced the Semurgh up just enough that its claws just missed catching the others as they spread out around the circle the Alphas were running. 

Also, I'd succeeded in diverting the Semurgh's attention. _This would be an excellent time to have a plan._ Plan. Right. This was not the monster I was looking for. 

Too bad no one told the Semurgh that. It didn't corner very well, but it had a hell of a reach. I scrambled towards the clear space around the base of the tower where the first of the Alphas was just coming back around to complete the circle. Something raced past behind me, and I loosed another gout of flame skywards just to be on the safe side. Exposed, the Semurgh made another run at me.

It was working: the circle had sprung up into being around me; I could feel it. Everything was going according to plan, except for one teensy-weensy detail.

The circle was interrupted and then reformed again just as quickly, half a dozen wills intent on joining it. My target had just passed out of range.

Crap.

Time to do something stupid. 

"Is that all you got?" I shouted at the Semurgh before it, too, could fly away, leaving me stranded ineffectually on the ground. "I've met songbirds with more punch. C'mon, just a little something to dance to, I feel a number coming on."

Ponderous wings flapped overhead, threatening to knock me to the biting ice courtyard.

"Well?" I hollered up. "Is this all the more Mab's renting her courtyard out for these days? The lowering menace act is getting kind of old. Bird-brain! What're you so scared of? Don't think you can take me in a fair fight?"

I heard the scream again, filled with an ancient rage. Taunting was a pretty effective tactic against anything from sorcerer-megalomaniacs to faerie monarchs. You can pretty much goad anyone into taking pot-shots at you if you're offensive enough.

"Old Tomnoddy!" I threw in for good measure, even though it wasn't very thematic. "Crap!"

The Semurgh dropped into another freakishly fast dive, and I fought the instinct to duck, instead gathering myself.

"Veni che!" I shouted and rose into the air.

I used a low-power version of this spell on a regular basis to help me pick up the Scamp one-handed, especially when she was in full tantrum-mode. This time, though, I didn't bother being delicate: half-assing this one met getting reacquainted with Mab's courtyard, really close up. 

I wrapped my limbs blindly around something cuttingly cold, doing my best not to let my staff fall from the withered fingers of my left hand. Despite its dog-like appearance, the Semurgh was covered in something less like fur and more like feathers or scales. Or possibly shards of ice; contact along the whole length of my body—skinny wizards have no natural insulation—I swear literally froze my thoughts until Lily's butterfly caught up with me and fluttered around my head, thawing them.

The Semurgh cried out again in outrage, still clawing its way upwards through the dead air. We cleared the walls of Arctis Tor just as the full moon broke over the the mountains of Winter, and staring stupidly up I got my first good look at the monster I was fighting.

Bob had been right: it was at least as big as an elephant. Vast wings unfurled above me, blotting out the faerie stars, limned by unearthly light. No wonder it had been doing all that up-and-down manoeuvring just now; with a wingspan as wide as a football field, even Mab's courtyard wasn't big enough for it.

I was clinging to the creature's long, trailing tail. Above me it writhed, and I suddenly found myself ducking enormous paw-swipes. I had a sudden flash of sympathy for how the mice Mister chases must feel.

I hunched down into my duster as best I could, allowing the enchanted leather to deflect what even poorly-lit, mostly-blocked glimpses revealed to be claws the size of scimitars. But that wouldn't do as a long-term strategy. The Semurgh wouldn't have to hit me too many more times to knock me off completely. I wasn't at my most effective with my arms both occupied hanging on for dear life, either.

The blows kept coming, and I peered through tail-feathers and monster-paws, looking for my opening. For just a moment, I locked eyes with the Semurgh. I felt my lips curl back, baring my teeth, and I snarled, "Forzare!"

I let go, let the blast of raw force push at me as much as it did the Semurgh and send me soaring out over empty air. Which quickly became falling through empty air

Again, I summoned the wind, this time for vantage. I scrambled to orient myself and locate Bogeys One and Two. Somehow, I needed to convince Bogey Two to turn around and fly back into my circle.

Below me, fae-birds were still mobbing Mab's courtyard, their riotous calls almost drowned out by the thrumming of their wings. The Semurgh was turning and putting on more altitude, clearly gearing up to take another shot at me.

I finally caught sight of Bogey Two over the mountains. Its pale, glacial colouration meant that it almost disappeared against the backdrop of the snowpack, except the iridescent flashes coming off the Semurghs' ice-feathers were the only hints of colour in the entire moon-bleached landscape. 

That was all the more time the Semurgh gave me, and it was only the fact that I hadn't yet released the wind that allowed me to escape. I managed to judo the slipstream of the Semurgh's passage to shoot myself out of range. The Semurgh's body seemed to take a long time to go past, even at speed. I watched with horror as my staff clipped one of those great wings and fell spinning out of sight.

Sweat was actually forming on my brow as I took control of my trajectory, aiming myself at my real target. The Semurgh was hard on my tail; damn, but it could corner. 

It was also faster than me. I felt the change when we broke out of the circle the Alphas were still running, hundreds of feet below. It didn't make my evocations any easier, but the real hitch was what even assuming hollow bones was still probably several tons of angry predator swooping down on me. 

I shouted and summoned up a gust that would bounce me momentarily upwards against the pull of gravity as the monster shot by underneath me. But the Semurgh twisted in mid-air, stretching out a graceful forelimb to snag me with a claw.

If I'd been facing the other direction, I'd have been caught like a carcass on a butcher's hook, and that would have been the end of it. As it was, I found myself being pulled down into biting range. The Semurgh's gaping maw—anything with that many teeth that size and shape justifies the term; trust me on this—yawned beneath me like a pit full of monster icicles, and it didn't smell any too good, either.

 _Hell's bells_ , I gibbered, the terror rising up in me. Terror is great motivation, especially as long as your adrenal glands still have something in reserve. So it was mostly on terror and reflex that I shoved my right hand out in front of me and screamed, "Fuego!"

The Semurgh shrieked in outrage more than pain at the puny gout of fire this produced and convulsed, incidentally tossing me like a bean-bag. I hit something cold, but everything here was cold and at least it offered the promise of not falling to my death, so I hung on while I waited for my head to stop feeling like someone had struck a gong inside it.

The thing I was holding onto howled again and heaved. Oh, crap, I realised. I was hanging onto the back of the Semurgh. 

I had just gotten around to wondering, _Shit, what do I do now?_ when something the approximate size of a monster truck slammed into me and knocked me loose.

As I was frantically trying to gather enough focus out of _panic, panic, I'm falling!_ to start my Buzz Lightyear performance again, I saw another winged figure sailing overhead. Well, I figured out how to get Bogey Two's attention. Apparently even in species that spawned asexually, you didn't mess with momma. But the baby Semurgh was still clumsy and had only managed to send me spinning off into the night like a Raggedy Ann doll instead of grabbing me and biting my head off.

There was enough lateral momentum in the resultant trajectory to give me a good head start on the angry flying monsters. I must have looked like a big, black bunny rabbit hopping around the sky, or the ball in one of those children's sing alongs: just follow the bouncing wizard. Whenever one of the semurghs got too close, I pushed off it for more altitude. It was easier than using the wind, which was important because I was running out of gas. _Stupid, Harry. You should have made a flying potion._ Except I'd have had to go back to my apartment for that, and I hadn't wanted to take the time. 

I _had_ to get the baby semurgh back into the circle. But keeping one eye on Artic Tor—or trying to—meant I only had one eye left to watch out for the flying purple people-eaters. Of course, I didn't know for a fact that semurghs ate people; but since Mamma Semurgh's maw was definitely capable of finishing me in two bites, I figured the question of whether it spat or swallowed was moot.

Unfortunately, the semurghs were not very interested in being led. I was going to be black and blue for a month after this, magically enhanced duster or no; I felt like a volleyball, or possibly Pong. As we neared Mab's battle-scarred fortress, I hoped fervently that the Alphas were still holding the circle in place. 

One of the semurghs swooped in and raked me with its claws, sending me tumbling ass over tea kettle just as we crossed over the black ice walls. Exerting my faltering will to stabilise myself, I tried to decide whether the air had that peculiar still feeling that came with being in a circle. All I could sense right now was the ringing in my ears. There were probably too many people—or whatever—inside the circle with me to tell, anyway.

After a moment, I realised the only motion I could see was the flickering of Lily's butterfly. It had stuck with me through all my amateur aerobatics, although it hadn't kept my hands and feet from going numb. 

Or my brain. I had to find a way to end this, and fast. I was _looking the hell_ up, but neither of the semurghs were in sight, I was running out of juice like a kindergarten class after recess, and—

I felt my eyes widen. I reached out a hand to the butterfly. And then I had another thought.

Hitchcock. I looked up. And then, I looked down.

Both Semurghs were barrelling up at me like rockets with fangs. I was exhausted, half-frozen, tapped out. My only recourse was to let myself fall and hope I missed them on my way down. 

I hoped really, really hard I was right about this. I reached blindly, hand and will, for Lily's butterfly, already shaping the spell in my mind.

Sudden warmth flooded into me through my left hand. I thanked my lucky stars, thrust my suddenly tingling right hand downwards, and roared, "Fuego!"

The effect was much better this time: a column of fire as wide as my shoulders erupted from my outstretched hand. Woa, that was more than I'd been expecting. 

The Semurghs snarled and broke right and left, real Top Gun style. All they were missing were contrails. I just hoped no one had been directly beneath that shot. 

No time to worry about that now. I summoned the wind to bear me after my quarry; the bitter air was nothing more than a balmy breeze against my raw face. Lily's fire filled me with the heat of a roaring bonfire and the summer sun. I felt like I ought to be shining more brightly than the moon.

The semurghs howled, and the deep, old outrage shook even the confidence of my sudden endorphin rush. I was faced once more with the problem of tracking them both at once; now we were in the circle, I needed to get close to the baby, but mamma would still shred me if she got her claws on me.

So I aimed myself at baby, gritting my teeth with the effort of holding onto two spells at once.

Mamma did not disappoint. She stooped like a falcon, and even without the proper altitude that was going to hurt. 

If I hadn't already had the spell at my fingertips, I wouldn't have had time to respond. But rule number one of wizardry, much like the Boy Scouts and the internal politics of lion prides on the savannah, is _be prepared_. I hit the Semurgh with another blast of fire, this one somewhat more focussed. It wasn't as quick to dodge this time, and I scored a singeing hit to one shoulder, knocking it off target. When it tried to correct, there was a god-awful sound and it shot right past me, sucking me down with it. 

"Forzare!" I yelled desperately, unceremoniously shoving my enemy with my will and once again taking advantage of Newton's third law of motion.

The Semurgh was slow to pull out of its dive, and the noise it made when it spread its wings sounded like it might be cursing in a language I was very glad I didn't know. Baby Semurgh started to move in, but Mamma said something in that maybe-language to stop it. It called back, and my finely-tuned parental ear had no trouble hearing the whine.

"No!" the Semurgh said in its spine-chilling voice. "Flee the circle!"

Well, that tore it. Baby Semurgh yawped a truly weird grumble and banked, heading back towards the mountains.

"Fuego!" I shouted, and fired a warning shot past its muzzle.

It was a bluff, but it worked. Baby Semurgh turned again, momentarily uncertain, and I seized the opportunity to blow myself upwards at frigging hurricane speeds. The unhappy sounds coming up to me from below indicated that Mamma Semurgh wasn't out of the picture just yet. 

There was no heat but mine in the middle of the night, in the heart of winter, and so no updrafts to buoy the Semurgh upwards. But even injured it had a lot more practice flying than I did, and it was going to get there first. 

I had a choice. I had no idea how Thomas, Marcone, and the Alphas were doing down there. I could already feel the strength leant to me by Lily's butterfly beginning to ebb. We needed to finish the job and get out of here, or we were all going to end up as bird food. Plus, principles aside, this thing was really starting to tick me off.

Mamma Semurgh was easier to see against the snow capped peaks, with the cracked and charred wound in its shoulder. The shot was perfect. I drew in the fire, getting ready to let go of the wind.

And, yeah. I smote its ruin upon the mountainside.

I felt pretty smug about that for maybe half a second, until I realised I was falling again, and not so much with style. I gathered up the last wisps of Summer fire to call another wind so I could finish this business.

Baby Semurgh's scream spilt the air, somewhat shriller than its parent's. Oh, look. It was coming to me. How considerate. I groped at my neck for the feather Toot had stolen from Bird Sorceress and tore it off over my head. 

Instead of more wind, I fed power through my shield bracelet, just for a moment. Just for long enough that the Semurgh didn't kill me on impact. Once it had me, its wings snapped out, levelling off our abrupt descent. Its paws trapped me against it, and it reared its head back in preparation for tearing at my throat and breaking my neck. 

In the moment before it struck, I stabbed the feather into it. "Seiunge!"

Bob had hemmed and hawed a lot when I asked him about the chances of getting the kids back sane. I'd decided it would take a better wizard than me to give them a real chance. This definitely wasn't the sort of thing you wanted to do on the fly, in any case. Heh. Get it? Fly? Birds?

So we'd decided to try something simpler.

I wasn't entirely sure what to expect, but what happened was a little anti-climactic. One second, there was a creature of fantasy and myth, sculpted from ice and opal; the next, a tangled flurry of very confused birds. They jostled each other for a moment, then flew off in all directions. If everything went right, they'd each be drawn to one of the harnesses the Alphas were carrying, which would bind them into quiescence until I found somebody who could undo the rest of it. Or I had a chance to study up on it a bit more.

It was, though I said so myself, a good plan. There was just one thing I'd kind of forgotten when I was putting it together.

Out of the two of us, the Semurgh was the one with wings.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooooo that took a little longer than I was expecting. For a while there I thought I was going to get everything wrapped up this chapter, and then I ran face-first into a wall of logistics I'd been cleverly ignoring in favour of more exciting logistics. And then on Wednesday I realised I was at a chapter break. So probably one more chapter after this and then an epilogue.

I allowed myself exactly one girly shriek of alarm to clear my head, on the same principle that martial artists use kiai, then reached one final time for the wind, feeling like it had already scoured out everything inside of me. We'd lost more altitude in that dive than I'd thought; and instead of being able to gently and gracefully float on down to the courtyard or, even better, outside the walls, the best I could do was brake my fall to the top of the spire of Arctis Tor.

I landed in a tree, of all things. Its branches were winter-bare and thickly coated in ice, of course, but still. A tree. 

I didn't land gracefully, either. I managed to mostly protect my face, although it was scratched and wind-chapped enough already that it was hard to tell, and not losing any eyeballs was always a plus; but it meant that I kind of crashed down through the branches, breaking the smaller ones and bouncing off the big one like a black leather pinball. When this was all over, I had a creeping hunch that I'd never want to move again. Ow.

Something else I discovered on my way down was that this wasn't really a tree. It was a sculpture, carved or grown from brackish ice. The tinkling noise it made as it shattered accompanied me as I fell, shards of it finding their way inside my collar and down the back of my neck.

I finally bumped to a stop, hung up on a forking limb several feet off the tower roof. My arms flew up with a jolt, leaving me face to face with a grotesque parody of a human visage, presumably Mab's own twisted version of the Green Man.

"Uwaaagh!" I shrieked, startled.

Then, to my horror, the thing's eyes snapped open, staring blindly at me, and it screamed. 

I screamed back, recoiling from the hoarse, almost voiceless cry that rattled from the thing's cracked lips. It took on an edge of real fright as my reflexive attempts to _get the hell away_ dislodged me and I fell completely out of the tree.

For a moment, I just lay there on my back, allowing my scattered wits to settle. "What the stones shit bells?" I asked in a voice half an octave higher than my usual register.

There was a series of clicking noises from the tree. I sat up, looking around, just in time to get hit on the head with something hard.

I blinked, looking down at the thing that had bounced off my skull and was now rolling back and forth lazily on the icy ground. It was my staff.

Gingerly, I gathered it up and used it to lever my creaky way to my feet. All that reviving Summer energy was definitely wearing off.

There were other things in the tree, bird and beast, all of them glazed into immobility by a thin rime of frost. Except for the gargoyle face.

A face attached to a person, I now saw. A naked man hanging crucified from the branches, limbs bound in ice as Winter slowly, slowly ate him. Everything else here—except for the lopsided mess I'd made of the ice tree—was perfectly preserved. I did not have a good feeling about this.

I also kept having a feeling like there was something familiar about the man on the tree. Against my better judgement, I took a step closer.

His hair was longer than mine, and I was getting to the point where I was going to hack six or so inches of it off again soon; going raggedly to white in a way that looked to me more like the result of head trauma than old age. Blood and spittle dripping from his lips had frozen his beard into a matted, disgusting mess. His body was wasted, rotting, scarred. But now that I was looking at him upright, I knew him, and I fought the urge to retch.

"Who is there?" croaked Lloyd Slate, the Winter Knight.

And people wonder why I don't take the job.

I licked my lips. "Dresden."

I'm not sure the sound Slate made then can be called a laugh; it certainly couldn't be called sane. Not that Slate was rowing with both oars in the water _before_ he found himself on the business end of Mab's bad side. I'm pretty sure you'd have to be crazy to sign up as Winter Knight; but there's crazy, and then there's double-crossing the Queen of Air and Darkness. And that had been one of his _better_ character traits. 

"You're here. Thank god, you're here. You bitch, I've been waiting so long." Slate's hair crackled as he twisted his head away from me, probably the only motion available to him. It bared the fish-pale skin of his throat. "Free me. Do it, quickly."

I'd been more than a little rattled, and I didn't immediately get what he was saying. A part of me instantly rebelled at the idea, the part that takes it a little _too_ personally when a woman is raped, when a girl is killed, when a man decides his dick's all the justification he needs.

"Kill me." Lloyd Slate's rasp hit me like a slap in the face. "Kill me. Kill me. Thank god, Dresden, kill me. Free me from this nightmare."

I felt abruptly nauseous. For once the clear, cold air was helpful. And by the time I got my breathing steadied and shored up my mental walls—I did _not_ need a repetition of last fall's anger management failures—Slate had thankfully subsided back into unconsciousness.

For the first time, I took the time to really look at my surroundings. Almost everything on the parapet was made of ice, and everything that wasn't was covered in it. It might have had the shape of a garden, with trees and flowers and idyllic benches, but it felt more like a prison. My eye found the bright patches of colour easily, but it was drawn towards another disruption in the otherwise unblemished, unchanging scene. 

The all-too-familiar face of my godmother, the Leanansidhe, topping a rough ice statue kind of like a full-body version of those wax hand things you can get at fairs. Only something had melted the covering away from her head and shoulders—probably that wild shot I'd taken at the semurghs, I thought.

"Stars! Lea! How long have you been standing there?"

Lea gave me a long-suffering look for that particular piece of idiocy; but, given the way her usually-vibrant hair was plastered damply to her face and her eyes shone with an unsettling, febrile light, it lacked her usual refined edge. I still flushed. _Hells bells, calm down, Harry_ , I told myself.

"I thought you might have had enough shocks for one day."

"Uh, thanks, I guess. Did _Mab_ do this to you?" I asked, the gears of my brain grinding slowly into gear at last. Last year, during the whole mess with Necromancermania that had trashed my apartment, I'd tried to dial up Lea and gotten Mab instead. I'd been afraid my head cold had somehow screwed up the invocation, and of course Mab had been a cagey bitch about it. But no, apparently Lea had been busy getting the ice treatment at Mab's Cold Spring Spa. "I know _I_ hit every branch on the crazy tree on the way down, but what's your excuse?" 

Lea's laugh was even less reassuring than it usually was, if not as horrible as the noise Slate had made. The gold of her eyes glinted like coins as they darted back to fix on Slate's mutilated body.

"You do not understand his true torment."

"Umm..." I said, very unpressingly.

"There is pain, of course," Lea continued almost dreamily. "But anyone can inflict pain. Accidents inflict pain. Pain is the natural order of the universe, and so it is hardly a tool mete for the Queen of Air and Darkness. She tortures him with kindness."

"This is just the set-up. She takes him down again, doesn't she?" Cold. But then, what else would you expect? 

Lea smiled, a chilling, slightly mad expression.

"She heals his wounds and takes his pain. She restores his sight, and the first thing his eyes see is the face of she who delivers him from agony. She cares for him with her own hands, warms him, feeds him, cleans away the filth. And then she takes him to her bower. Poor man. He knows that when he wakes, he will hang blind upon the tree again—and can do naught else but long for her return."

I shook my head. "You think he's going to fall for that? Fall in love with her?"

"Love. Perhaps, and perhaps not." Lea seemed almost amused. "But need. Oh, yes. You underestimate the simple things, godchild. Love. Being given food and warmth. Being touched. Being cleaned and cared for—and desired. Over and over, spinning him through agony and ecstasy. The mortal mind breaks down. Not all at once. But slowly. The way water will wear down stone. It is a slow seduction. A conversion by the smallest steps."

I thought, uncomfortably, of Marcone.

"Yes," Lea agreed, as though she'd been reading my mind. "Mab, you see, is patient. She has time. And when the last walls of his mind have fallen, and he looks forward with joy to his return to the tree, she will have destroyed him. And he will be discarded. He only lives so long as he resists." Her gaze was once more fixed on Slate, and I had no trouble whatsoever picturing with her the image of myself in his pace. "This is wisdom you should retain, my child."

"Do as I say, not as I do, eh?" I said with a pointed look at Lea's own imprisonment.

Lea seemed to deflate; and while she had been creeping me the hell out, this was possibly even more disturbing. "I grew too arrogant with the power I held. I thought I could overcome what stalks us all. Foolish. Milady Queen Mab taught me the error of my ways."

I was still trying to parse whatever the hell _that_ meant when suddenly I heard footsteps coming from somewhere behind me. Hand going to my blasting rod where it was still lashed to the inside of my duster, I spun and looked past the frozen forms of three Sidhe women frozen back to back to back to see Marcone burst out of an archway that must have led to the stairs. 

There was steam rising off Marcone's reddened face. I didn't want to think about how many stars he'd just run up; was the man trying to give himself a heart attack?

Alert green eyes locked on my movement immediately. "Thank god. Are you done here?"

"And they call you a gentleman."

Marcone shot me an irritated look. "Time is a factor; something else is coming this way."

"What?"

"Mister Raith did not provide a great deal of detail, but he was most insistent."

As always, Marcone looked like he was sucking on a lemon every time he mentioned Thomas. I ignored it, as usual, holding up my hand for silence so I could Listen.

An eldritch, creeping note; another, somehow liquid; yet another, hard and brassy; more and more, coming in from every direction. I recognised the calls of faerie horns. I'd heard them before.

The moonlight glinted off everything; but some of the glints on the horizon were shifting of their own accord, I saw when I opened my eyes again. I turned back to Lea. "This was me, wasn't it? The fire—"

"Summer fire, here in the heart of Winter."

Marcone actually almost jumped. "Jesus god!"

Lea spared him a glance, then went back to boring holes in me with her eyes. I felt kind of like a snake-charmer, or maybe it was the snake. The snowy slopes were being rapidly swallowed up by a darkling tide.

"So I pissed some people off." Well, I'd known that was going to happen going in.

"Indeed, all of Winter races for the chance to be first to taste your blood." Lea has a way of delivering these blood-chilling threats like she's complimenting my choice of evening gown or something.

"..." I said. "Right. Marcone, let's see if we can get this ice off without hurting her."

Marcone looked between us warily. "Who is she?"

"My frigging faerie godmother, okay? C'mon, I thought you were the one in a big hurry." I held out my hand, wiggling my fingers for one of Marcone's spare knives.

Lea choked, and for a moment her face reminded me of Lloyd Slate's. Crazy tree; I stifled the urge to erupt in hysterical giggles.

When we'd both managed to rein ourselves in, Lea looked more like herself than she had since I found her here; weary, as I'd never seen her before, but also less like she was about to go flying off the handle.

"Child. You must not free me."

 _What?_ "What?" I said aloud. "I'm not leaving you here like this." Sure, my godmother was about the most powerful, and so dangerous, creature in Winter short of Queen Mab herself. Sure, she'd taken advantage of me while I was scared and vulnerable and then, well, _hounded_ me for years trying to abduct me and _turn me into a dog_. But I still wasn't about to leave her Han Solo'd on top of Mab's fortress—if nothing else, she might think saving her was worth enough to actually cough up something about my mother.

"I cannot yet be trusted. It is not time. I would not be able to fulfil my promise to your mother, should you free me now. You must leave," Lea grated.

" _Trusted?_ " I mean, really. This was _Lea_ we were talking about.

"No time." Lea's voice was strained. "I cannot long keep it from taking hold of..."

Lea went limp, although the ice behind her head hadn't melted as far as the stuff in front, so we got a good look at the warring expressions ravaging her finely-sculpted face. It was coated not with sweat, as I first thought, but water, as though she was standing under a slow dribble. 

When she opened her eyes, Marcone put an arm out to hold me back. I swatted it down irritably, but I didn't make another move towards Lea.

"Godchild, why do you hesitate? Free me now and I will take you safely from here."

"You're right. It's time to go," I said, slowly backing away.

Lea's yowl of frustration shook another few ice-twigs from the tree. I grabbed Marcone and hot-footed it out of there before she woke up Lloyd Slate again.

As I passed the Sidhe noblewomen frozen in some hopeless last stand, I thought I saw one move in my peripheral vision, turning her head toward me. The statues were rimed over with faerie freezer burn, but I could have sworn I saw a flicker of colour, there and gone, the exact cool emerald of Mab's eyes—you didn't forget those eyes, even if there was no soul behind them to gaze upon and lock them in your memory.

Mab's eyes looked out at me from the statue and winked. 

I had a strong urge to run off the edge of the parapet and try my luck with the landing again. Instead, I settled for taking the steps down two and three at a time.  
__ __ __

"Is everyone okay?" I asked as we descended. "Did it work?"

"Mostly minor wounds," Marcone replied. "Shortly after all the roaring and flames stopped, the harnesses engaged. I can only assume the birds they caught were the correct ones."

"I warned you about that. Transmogrification's illegal, so I need help or—"

"—time to study the problem. Yes, I know. Your werewolves all left for the gateway as soon as the birds were secure. Most of the birds are pursuing them, but we were given to understand they would move faster on their own."

I panted a laugh. The kids were safe; even if we didn't make it out, the Council would take care of them. Everything they needed was in the harnesses. "And Thomas and Cujo?"

"Holding the entrance to the tower."

I cocked an eyebrow at Marcone. "So why wasn't it the vampire climbing four bajillion stairs to make sure I didn't land on my head?"

"It's my mission," Marcone said as levelly as you can when you're breathing that hard. Down wasn't as bad as up, but several hundred feet amounts to a whole lot of windy staircase. "Faerie godmother, Dresden?"

I winced. "Believe me, it's way less cool than it sounds."

"What was wrong with her?"

"We all go a little mad, sometimes." I shrugged.

Marcone let it drop. Hell, _I_ didn't know what was going on with Lea. But apparently she was a voluntary centrepiece to Mab's ice garden. More or less.

We didn't stop long at the bottom of the tower, just ducked our heads outside to scout around and legged it. In addition to various horn calls, we could now clearly hear a cacophony of drums, shrieks, and war cries. My mind worked furiously. 

The sky, which had been clouding over all the time I was talking to Slate and Lea, was covered completely by the time we cleared the outer walls, and we plunged into a white gale that had blown up, presumably in reaction to the same thing that had the rest of Winter so ticked off. I wrapped the remnants of Summer fire around us to keep the biting wind from killing us all with hypothermia, although it still flung up snow crystals in concealing billows all around us. 

Mouse and the Alphas had already broken a trail for us, though being somewhat less nimble we two-footers had to take the occasional detour. There was one place where Hendricks, eyeing the oncoming horde, growled something under his breath and actually shoved me and Marcone up a rocky bluff. Thomas, who had simply leapt to the top, caught and hauled us the rest of the way up, then bent to heave Hendricks off his feet.

I was already shaking with exhaustion, or maybe it was the cold, when the Alphas' trail started to fade, erased by the fury of Winter itself. There were no stars visible in the sky now, and the full moon was completely hidden behind veils of cloud and snow.

Questing out with my wizard's senses, I locked onto a breath of warmer magic that could only be Lily's gate. I took point from Hendricks, breaking the way more slowly with my staff. It was an uphill slog; and at first I thought I was hallucinating the puff of summer air and hazy, sepia-tinged glow hovering in front of me. 

We were maybe thirty yards away when something huge and shaggy flung itself out of the snow in front of us; then another, and another. 

I threw the last of my reserves into my shield bracelet to give the boys time to ready an attack, but the creatures sailed past us, loosing their own spine-chilling howls in response to the battle sounds of Winter's armies.

Relief flooded through me. "Come on; it's all right!" I shouted, dropping the shield and forging onward. Close; so close.

A furred shape bumped up against my hip, and I leaned on it gratefully, letting it guide me back to warmth and light. More streamed out, encircling us like an honour guard. They'd been fast getting those harnesses off. Either that, or...

I knew I was back in Chicago when the temperature rose a hundred degrees between one step and the next, but the only light was the flickering flame from the butterflies on the border of Lily's portal. Mouse—from the height, it had to be Mouse—gently steered me out of the way as everyone else boiled through in a mass of ectoplasm and fur. Yummy. I could just make out Lily's profile folding as the fire flickered out and the portal closed.

Someone had set up a camp lantern at the other end of the greenhouse, where the Alphas were all putting their clothes back on, except for a few with bandages who were dressed already. My group all looked like drowned rats, even Thomas, although the ectoplasm was already evaporating. 

Billy Borden came over to me. "I thought you _weren't_ going to piss off all the faeries this time," he said.

"That was only like half," I protested. Or, okay, maybe two-thirds. Thomas was right: that had definitely been the Erlking calling the Wild Hunt down on my ass.

Marcone had offered Lily a hand up from a bed of wildflowers I didn't remember being there when we left. Fix appeared at her other side. They started walking her in the direction of a chair, but she shook her head. There were a lot of things I wanted to talk about with Lily, but rather fewer I wanted to discuss in front of Marcone. I barely got the time of day (four a.m. Sunday morning) out of her before they were off. 

I heaved myself up with a sigh and tottered over to check on the de-semurghified bird-kids, shooting Marcone a glare when he made to help me, too. Instead, I leaned on my staff, like a proper wizard. 

Seven harnesses, seven birds. The Alphas hadn't undone any of the knots except the safe ones I'd pointed out to them, so the birds were still bound and motionless. In addition to the birds I'd known about, there was also a heron, a nightingale, a partridge, and a duck, of all things. 

The Alphas filled me in on their side of things. All of them were peppered with pecks and scratches, although the thick fur of their wolf forms had saved them from the worst of it. Looking at some of the bandages, I wasn't so sure I was convinced.

Once I'd triggered the spell, they'd raced the birds to the portal, which is when the most serious injury—Tommy's wrenched shoulder—had happened. Apparently, Fix had been working some fire of his own, taking down the pursuit.

Back in Chicago, the Alphas had divested themselves of their harnesses; and the ones still in good enough shape to fight had gone back in. They claimed it had been a quick turnaround, although Tommy, Hannah, and Phil had had time to visit the ER and a Walgreens for stitches and snacks, respectively. 

Evidently most of the time-stretching had happened right before we crossed back over. That was another thing I wished I could talk with Lily about but didn't want to discuss with anyone else. Because from where I was sitting, we had walked in and out of Arctis Tor pretty easy. And there was flat-out no way the Summer Lady could have affected the passage of time in Winter, which had to have been Lily's game plan, giving me that butterfly to tap. I was the stalking goat, set out to lure Winter's forces into place; Maeve—it couldn't have been anyone else—pulled the whole region into the temporal slow lane, leaving Summer free to jump in on the White Council's side during the current confrontation. All nice, neat, and helpful.

I wouldn't have bet much on that being the whole story, though. What I'd seen on top of Arctis Tor... Frigging faeries; they were worse than White Court vampires, and that was saying something. Someone had used me to score off someone else, and I had no idea who it was. Lily? Maeve? _Mab?_ Even Titania was a possibility.

Meanwhile, I had birds to deal with. I'd have liked nothing better than to go home, kindle a fire in the fireplace, and lock myself and Maggie in for a month or so while I caught up on sleep. 

Instead of falling on my face, though, I next went outside to check on Marcone. He was talking to someone on a cell phone, though I assumed the absence of panicking mob enforcers meant he'd warned his people he might be out of touch for a while. Hendricks saw me approaching and grunted something to Marcone, who cut the call. Not that I was capable of frying so much as a microchip right now.

I set my jaw, still leaning rather heavily on my staff. "Well, this has been fun, but you should get going."

"Have you had a sudden insight in the last ten minutes? Because I seem to remember you saying something about needing time and resources before you could make an attempt to reverse what has been done to the children. I can provide you with a secure location where you can rest and work."

" _Really_ , Marcone?" I was too tired for this.

He huffed an impatient breath. "I thought I'd proved my intentions in this align with your own."

His eyes, washed out to a weird brownish colour in the sodium streetlight, caught mine. I looked away first.

"Look, the people I'm going to call in, they aren't going to trust you, and they aren't going to like any vanilla mortal being this deep in their business. I need them, and I'm already not their favourite person."

"I find that hard to believe; you're so good at making friends, after all."

I gave him a flat look. "Do you think you can stop being a control freak for long enough to let me do my job or what, Marcone?"

"At least allow me to provide transportations—"

I shook my head. "Think of it this way: the FBI is already looking at you pretty hard for this. If you don't touch anything, it can't lead back to you."

"The same might be said for you," Marcone pointed out.

I twiddled my fingers in the air. "Ma-a-agic."

"Honestly, Dresden." Marcone's tone was exasperated, but his expression was saying something else entirely.

I swallowed. "I'll let you know when it's done."  
__ __ __

Thomas had vamoosed almost as quickly as Lily and Fix, so it was just the Alphas and me. It didn't make me happy to know that he was feeding, but there wasn't anything I could do about it now except worry. So I worried.

"What now?" Georgia asked me. 

I was swaying on my feet. "Get the birds behind my wards. There isn't anywhere else, and I need to recharge before I c—hey!"

Georgia dangled my keys in front of me. "That's the second time you've almost fallen over even with the stick."

"I'll drive," Hannah offered.

"You're hurt," I objected.

"And well-rested. I'd have gone back in with the others, but I didn't want to pull my stitches. You coming or not?"

I grumbled under my breath, but graciously deigned to allow myself to be chauffeured. I waited for Mouse to clamber into the rear, replaced the improvised seat back, and got in.

I woke up to the sound of the car door opening. We were in the little gravel lot beside my building, the sky overhead just beginning to show hints of something other than light pollution. Mouse was snuffling impatiently at my ear.

Making a creaky old-person noise, I stumbled out of the Beetle and helped Hannah with the foam-covered boards. Mouse tumbled onto the ground like a furry landslide.

The rest of the Alphas were waiting for us. Yawning, I took down my wards, and we hauled the birds inside. 

Then they were gone and I was alone in my apartment with what probably looked like a major SPCA violation and a thirty pound cat who didn't know the meaning of the word 'domesticated'. Mister put his front paws up on the couch where four of the seven transformed birds were laid out and licked his whiskers. I put down the phone and decided that maybe moving them all downstairs had better be job one.

I gave Bob the Reader's Digest version of events while I cleared off enough space on one of my lab tables for the birds and brought them down, ignoring the indignant yowls and occasional odd thump from my bedroom. Mouse lay in front of the door with, I swear, a look of satisfaction on his face. They actually get along pretty well, most days; but from the look of it, Mouse enjoyed getting one over on Mister for once.

When all was done, the trap door to the basement closed and my bedroom door opened to disgorge a _very_ unhappy cat, I picked up the phone again. I called Inari's cell first (hey, I can't fry the things long-distance and Charity gets kind of grumpy when I wake the entire household at the crack of dawn) and let her know I was back safe and Molly could bring the Scamp back any time, although I was probably going to be unconscious for a while.

Next was a call to the Council requesting that they put me in touch with whatever they had for an expert on transformation and also informing them I'd dealt with Bird Sorceress. I then proceeded to fall into bed face first and sleep for fourteen hours straight.  
__ __ __

I woke up with a sudden weight on my diaphragm and a siren in my ear. "MOMMY MOMMY MOMMY! I's home!"

Squinting my eyes open cautiously, I hugged the little noisemaker. "Heya, Scamp. Sorry I took so long."

Maggie squirmed and poked me in the shoulder. "No more monsas?"

"No more monsters," I confirmed, flopping over onto my back. Ow.

Maggie frowned, which was adorable, and then poked me directly on a bruise, which was not. I groaned.

"Mommy hurt?"

"Oof. Mommy just fell down, sweetheart." A lot. "Did Molly bring you?"

"Aun' Em," Maggie agreed. "Said I's can wake you up."

"Well, that's nice," I said with about three hundred per cent less murder than I felt. Well, vengeance would be mine shortly. "O-okay. Mommy's going to try to get up now."

Maggie shrieked with laughter at the sounds I made as I stood up and staggered towards the bathroom. Every muscle in my body screamed, but my bladder felt like it was about to explode. I probably should have at least taken my jeans off when I got home, if only because I'd been able to _move_ then. My arms were stuck to the leather of my duster. At least I was warm.

I showered as quickly as humanly possible—I'd had enough cold for one lifetime, thank you—and tortured myself with some stretches just to get my muscles working again. At least it kept the Scamp entertained. Molly knocked on the door just as I was pulling my shirt on.

"Harry? Are you ready for coffee?"

"Is the answer to that question ever no?" I replied.

Molly opened the door and handed me a mug of steaming tan liquid that was more cream than coffee. My apprentice is even more of a nightmare in the kitchen than I am, but I dump like a quarter cup of half and half in anyway, so you can hardly taste if it's burnt.

"Let me guess: I should see the other guy," she said.

"You try getting repeatedly body-slammed by Clifford the Big Flying Dog and dropped into a tree."

Molly raised her adorned eyebrows. "Aw, boss, you get to have all the fun."

I took a casual sip of coffee. "Well, I was going to ask you to help with some set-up, but if _that's_ the way you feel..."

Molly perked up, much like Mouse does when I bring out the bacon. "Tonight?"

I shook my head. "Gotta work some things out, first. Take tonight, meditate, and be back here tomorrow morning around seven. And try not to dress too much like a hooker; we might be getting other wizards, and it's hard to respect someone when your first impression of them includes their belly-button ring."

Molly mumbled something that sounded like _reactionary old sticks_ into her can of coke.

"Yeah, but they're reactionary old sticks you're potentially going to have to be dealing with for the next few hundred years, so behave."

"What, like you do?"

"The Council wouldn't get so worked up over me if they didn't take me seriously," I said. "I wouldn't call it a _good_ first impression, but I don't get cat-called."

Molly left, and I took the Scamp down to the lab. Bob had been inspecting the birds. I put Maggie in her ghetto play-pen under the tables, although I had to watch my feet: Maggie had recently figured out the trick of picking out the knots in my shoelaces. Real highly evolved sense of humour on the kid. Good grasp of consequences. Just like her mom.

We're working on it, okay?

Bob and I talked transformation options and temporary warding for a while. Maggie fell asleep and I realised I was famished. I broke for food and to put the Scamp to bed. Mouse heaved himself up next to her like a life-sized teddy-bear. 

When I finally made it back down to the lab, shop talk devolved into a more detailed recounting of events. Bob agreed that it smelled pretty strongly of fish for a bird-themed outing. 

Being the responsible adult that I am, I forced myself to go lie in bed (I had to forcibly evict Mouse to fit) sometime after midnight. My body-clock was screwed all to hell, but that's what you get for dicking around in Faerie. But that wouldn't matter to the Scamp, who hadn't quite figured out _sleeping in_ yet. Hey, I was still grateful she was sleeping through the night. That first year, it had seemed like just when she was getting the hang of it, she started teething; and then it was just twenty-four-seven misery for everyone involved.

I lit the candle on my nightstand in its safety-glass chimney and settled in with my zombie-gnawed copy of _The Diamond Throne_. But my attention kept drifting to Maggie snuggled up next to me, back safe where she belonged.  
__ __ __

Molly showed up prepared this time, not only with her midriff covered, but with some of some of this truly foul Tibetan tea that the Knights of the Cross have adopted and which reminds you they're champions of a religion that espouses mortification of the flesh. I regretfully declined the muscle relaxants: never, and I cannot say this enough, plan or execute complex magical undertakings while you're on drugs. 

At least I was well-rested, even if I had fallen asleep the second time with my head at an unnatural angle. I could have just gone on working all night; but I'd tapped myself out doing all those showy acrobatics back at Arctis Tor, and to pull off the rest of it, I was going to need my batteries fully charged.

I was in the middle of the usual morning circus with the Scamp, somewhat at at disadvantage from the (alas also not unusual) achy and prematurely disintegrating condition of my body. The need for a highchair was obviated by my lack of anything to sit at other than my coffee table, which was more or less Scamp-height; but of course my rugs suffered in consequence. 

Selfishly, I left Molly to try to stop Maggie from smearing applesauce all over Mouse's head while I double-fisted Holy Zen spore tea and my morning coffee. Mister padded over to investigate; he licked Mouse's gooey fur experimentally. 

Apparently it wasn't to his taste, because he sniffed and turned to saunter away, abandoning Mouse to his fate. Mouse dropped his jaw in a doggy grin, and I swear I saw a glint of anticipation in his eyes before he shook himself, spraying everything within about two feet of himself with atomised applesauce, including Mister, Molly, my couch, and my kid.

Mister yowled indignantly and shot off to the top of a bookshelf, while the Scamp crowed, "Bad dog!" and, somewhat inconsistently, threw her arms as far around Mouse's neck as they would go. Beside her, the look on Molly's face so closely matched the expression of offended dignity Mister was wearing that I snorted devil-tea up my nose.

By the time we got everything cleaned up, Mister released to either lick his wounded pride or relieve his feelings by killing unsuspecting pet bulldogs, and Mouse hosed off and left to dry outside—he could take his chances with Mister's retribution—the phone still hadn't rung. I'd been hoping that with Summer's help, the Council and the Venatori would have handed the Reds their asses in short order, thus freeing up someone to de-bird the kids. Maybe my old mentor Ebenezar McCoy; I didn't like it, but he _did_ have licence to break the laws of magic. Maybe he'd had some experience with that one.

They didn't call and they didn't call. I gave Molly the basic rundown of what had happened at Arctis Tor. When she started asking about some of the _other_ things that had happened this week, I had the Scamp help me test Molly's progress with her shield. It wasn't perfect, but there had definitely been progress. I guess flocks of angry birds are as effective teaching tools as baseballs. It made me grimace, but Molly erupted into an inexplicable fit of giggles when I said it out loud.

Molly and I worked together some more, and she and the Scamp gave me a post mortem on her training session with the Alphas earlier in the week. (Some of the scratches on Molly's arms were actually from all the falling down that came from city girl trying to run through the woods.) In all, it had been a properly humbling experience for my apprentice.

Good. Molly was at that age where young people stop believing anything anybody tries to tell them until they run face-first into it and break their metaphorical noses (not that I have any experience whatsoever with this frame of mind), an attitude that wasn't helped any by her recent birthday rendering her a legal adult. Realising that _I_ wasn't the only one who could knock her on her ass was an important part of her education.

I swung around back to check on Mouse when Maggie and I went out to get the mail. He was sunning himself, still slightly damp, while my upstairs neighbours' girl told him at length what she thought of the smell of wet dog. 

Maggie absolutely refused to settle down. I love my daughter, I really do; but she hadn't really evolved much of a conception of what a 'distraction' was. Which was ironic, because she was an excellent one. And I of course had absolutely no willpower when it came to being distracted. 

It finally came to the point where I sent Molly outside with her to blow off some steam. Between Molly, Mouse, and the wards I'd put up around the building, the Scamp would be safe enough. My apprentice got into really unattractive teenage snits whenever she started to feel she was getting stuck with sprog duty too often; but I needed to be where I could hear the phone, and Molly wasn't going to figure out how to change those kids back.

There was an extension in my lab now, so I settled in down there with Bob and the bird-boys and the trap-door closed. Personally, I preferred not to chance the phone ringing right in my ear when I was trying to concentrate on something delicate—just the one upstairs was bad enough—but body-jewellery aside Molly was a well-brought-up young lady, and it was easier to turn the ringer off when I needed to concentrate than it was hauling my apprentice to the ER when she took the ladder too fast and fell off. 

As it happened, it wasn't a problem that afternoon. By dinner, I was as cranky as the Scamp, who was apparently boycotting naptime out of sheer contrariness. The only call I'd gotten all day was from Georgia, making sure I hadn't slipped into a coma. 

Predictably, the phone rang just as Maggie was finally drifting off. I sighed, setting down the yellow legal pad where I'd been putting together my report to the Council and reached for the receiver. The Scamp stirred against me, grumbling. Optimistically, I rubbed soothing circles on her back as I answered the phone.

Across the coffee table, Molly perked up from where she was sprawled across one of my arm chairs. I was pretty sure she'd devolved from working out a set of power calculations and ritual circles to doodling in her own notebook. She'd vetoed her usual spot crammed into a corner of my lab on the undeniable grounds that it smelled like bird. I had ignored Bob's similar loud complaints, seeing as he didn't possess a nose.

"So. Field trip, boss?" Molly asked eagerly when I hung up the phone. 

I looked down at the Scamp, who had been poking me all through the brief telephone conversation to express her displeasure with all the noise. Stars, this was going to be fun.


End file.
